WALKING-STICK PAPERS 
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY 



WALKING STICK 
PAPERS ^ 



BY 

ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY 

AUTHOR OF "booth TARKINGTON," ETC. 




NEW >tSJrYORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1918, 
By George H. Doran Company 



Printed in the United States of America 

OCI lOlbia 

©CI.A506126 



AS A CAT MAT LOOK AT A KING 

SO I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE DOINGS TO 

THREE FINE MEN: 

W. C. BROWNELL 
HILAIRE BELLOC 
ROYAL CORTISSOZ 

BECAUSE THEY REPRESENT TO MT MIND 

THE BEST THINGS GOING : 

THE PURE MILK OF THE WORD 



FOREWORD 

These little records of some excursions made by 
what Mr. James called "a visiting mind" first 
saw the light of public countenance in the pages 
of various publications. *'On Going to Art Ex- 
hibitions" has been much expanded since its ap- 
pearance in Vanity Fair. In The Unpopular 
Review the original title of "That Reviewer 
'Cuss' " was brought into harmony with the dig- 
nity of its setting by being changed to "The Hack 
Reviewer." "A Clerk May Look at a Celebrity" 
was printed in the New York Times under the 
head "Glimpses of Celebrities." This paper has 
been included in this collection at the request of 
several distinguished gentlemen who have been 
so unfortunate as to lose their newspaper clip- 
pings of the article. That several of the person- 
ages figuring in this and one or two other of these 
papers have passed away since these papers were 
written seems to be thought an additional reason 
for reprinting these essays here. The Bellman 
fell for "Caun't Speak the Language"; the New 

[vii] 



FOREWORD 

York Tribune, "Humours of the Bookshop"; 
The Independent, "Reading After Thirty." 
"You Are an American" appeared in the New 
York Stm; where the head "An American Re- 
viewer in London" was substituted for the title 
of "Literary Levities in London." The follow- 
ing papers were contributed to the New York 
Evening Post: "The Fish Reporter," "On Going 
a Journey," "A Roundabout Paper," "Henry 
James, Himself," "Memories of a Manuscript," 
"Why Men Can't Read Novels by Women," 
"The Dessert of Life," "Hunting Lodgings," 
"My Friend, the Policeman," "Help Wanted," 
"Human Municipal Documents," "As to Peo- 
ple," "A Town Constitutional," and "On Wear- 
ing a Hat." "On Carrying a Cane" appeared 
in The Bookman. I thank the editors of the 
publications named for permission to reprint 
these papers here. R. C. H. 

New York, 1918. 



[viiil 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

Prologue: On Carrying a Cane 13 

I The Fish Reporter ....... 28 

II On Going a Journey 45 

III Going to Art Exhibitions 57 

IV A Roundabout Paper 74 

V That Reviewer "Cuss" 87 

VI Literary Levities in London .... 108 

VII Henry James, Himself 121 

VIII Memories of a Manuscript .... 130 

IX "You Are an American" 144 

X Why Men Can't Read Novels by Women 159 

XI The Dessert of Life 171 

XII A Clerk May Look at a Celebrity . . 186 

XIII Caun't Speak the Language .... 201 

XIV Hunting Lodgings 214 

XV My Friend, the Policeman .... 221 

XVI Help Wanted — ^Male, Female . . . 229 

XVII Human Municipal Documents . . . 239 

XVIII As to People 254 

XIX Humours of the Book Shop .... 261 

XX The Deceased 270 

XXI A Town Constitutional 282 

XXII Reading After Thirty 296 

Epilogue: On Wearing A Hat 301 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

PROLOGUE 

ON CARRYING A CANE 

SOME people, without doubt, are born with 
a deep instinct for carrying a cane; some 
consciously acquire the habit of carrying a cane; 
and some find themselves in a position where the 
matter of carrying a cane is thrust upon them. 

Canes are carried in all parts of the world, 
and have been carried — or that which was the 
forefather of them has been carried — since hu- 
man history began. Indeed, a very fair account 
of mankind might be made by writing the story 
of its canes. And nothing that would readily 
occur to mind would more eloquently express a 
civiHsation than its evident attitude toward canes. 
Perhaps nothing can more subtly convey the 
psychology of a man than his feeling about a 
cane. 

The prehistoric ape, we are justified in assum- 
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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ing, struggled upright upon a cane. The cane, 
so to speak, with which primitive man wooed his 
bride, defended his hfe, liberty and pursuit of 
happiness, and brought down his food, was (like 
all canes which are in good taste) admirably 
chosen for the occasion. The spear, the stave, 
the pilgrim's staff, the sword, the sceptre — 
always has the cane-carrying animal borne some- 
thing in his hand. And, down the long vista of 
the past, the cane, in its various manifestations, 
has ever been the mark of strength, and so of 
dignity. Thus as a man originally became a 
gentleman, or a king, by force of valour, the cane 
in its evolution has ever been the symbol of a 
superior caste. 

A man cannot do manual labour carrying a 
cane. And it would be a moral impossibility for 
one of servile state — a butler, for instance, or a 
ticket-chopper — to present himself in the role of 
his occupation ornamented with a cane. One 
held in custody would not be permitted to appear 
before a magistrate flaunting a cane. Until the 
stigma which attaches to his position may be 
erased he would be shorn of this mark of nobility, 
the cane. 

Canes are now carried mostly by the very 
[14] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

youthful and the very aged, the powerful, the dis- 
tinguished, the patrician, the self-important, and 
those who fancy to exalt themselves. Some, to 
whom this privilege is denied during the week 
by their fear of adverse public opinion, carry 
canes only on Sundays and holidays. By this it 
is shown that on these days they are their own 
masters. 

Custom as to carrying canes varies widely in 
different parts of the world ; but it may be taken 
as a general maxim that the farther west you go 
the less you see of canes. The instinct for carry- 
ing a cane is more natural in old civilisations, 
where the tradition is of ancient growth, than 
in newer ones, where frequently a cane is re- 
garded as the sign of an effete character. As we 
have been saying, canes, we all feel, have an affin- 
ity with the idea of an aristocracy. If you do 
not admit that the idea of an aristocracy is a good 
one, then doubtless you are down on canes. It 
is interesting to observe that canes have flour- 
ished at all especially chivalrous periods and in 
all especially chivalrous communities. No illus- 
trator would portray a young planter of the Old 
South without his cane; and that fragrant old- 
school figure, a southern "Colonel," without his 

[15] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

cane is inconceivable. Canes connote more or 
less leisure. They convey a subtle insinuation of 
some degree of culture. 

Tbey always are a familiar article of a gentle- 
man's dress in warm climates. The cane, quite 
strictly speaking, in fact has its origin in warm 
countries. For properly speaking, the word cane 
should be restricted in its application to a pecul- 
iar class of palms, known as ratans, included 
under the closely allied genera Calamivs and 
Doemonorops, of which there are a large nmnber 
of species. These plants, the Encyclopedia tells 
us, are found widely extended throughout the 
islands of the Indian Archipelago, the Malay 
Peninsula, China, India and Ceylon; and exam- 
ples have also been found in Australia and 
Africa. The learned Rumphius describes them, 
under the name of Palmijunci, as inhabitants of 
dense forests into which the rays of the sun scarce 
can penetrate, where they form spiny bushes, ob- 
structing the passage through the jungle. They 
rise to the top of the tallest trees and fall again 
so as to resemble a great length of cable, adorned, 
however, with the most beautiful leaves, pinnated 
or terminating in graceful tendrils. The plants 
creep or trail along to an enormous length, some- 
[16] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

times, it is said, reaching five hundred feet. Two 
examples of Calamus verus^ measuring respec- 
tively two hundred and seventy feet and two hun- 
dred and thirty feet, were exhibited in the Paris 
exhibition of 1855. 

The well-known Malacca canes are obtained 
from Calamus Scnpionum, the stems of which are 
much stouter than is the case with the average 
species of Calamus. Doubtless to the vulgar a 
Malacca cane is merely a Malacca cane. There 
are, however, in this interesting world choice spir- 
its who make a cult of Malacca canes, just as 
some dog fanciers are devotees of the Airedale 
terrier. Such as these know that inferior Malacca 
canes are, as the term in the cane trade is, 
"shaved" ; that is, not being of the circumference 
most coveted, but too thick, they have been whit- 
tled down in bulk. A prime Malacca cane is, of 
course, a natural stem, and it is a nice point to 
have a slight irregularity in its sjTnmetry as evi- 
dence of this. The delicious spotting of a 
Malacca cane is due to the action of the sun upon 
it in drying. As the stems are dried in sheaves, 
those most richly splotched are the ones that have 
been at the outside of the bundle. What new 
strength to meet life's troubles, what electric ex- 

[17] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

pansion of soul, come to the initiated upon the 
feel of the vertebra of his Malacca cane! 

The name of cane is also applied to many 
plants besides the Calamus, which are possessed 
of long, slender, reed-like stalks or stems, as, for 
instance, the sugar-cane, or the reed-cane. From 
the use as walking-sticks to which many of these 
plants have been applied, the name cane has been 
given generally to "sticks" irrespective of the 
source from which they are derived. 

Our distinguished grandfathers carried canes, 
frequently handsome gold-headed ones, especially 
if they were ministers. Bishops, or "Presiding 
Elders;" when, in those mellow times, it was the 
custom for a congregation to present its minister 
with a gold-headed cane duly inscribed. Our 
fathers of some consequence carried canes of a 
gentlemanly pattern, often ones with ivory 
handles. Though in the days when those of us 
now sometime grown were small one had to have 
arrived at the dignity of at least middle-age be- 
fore it was seemly for one to carry a cane. In 
England, however, and particularly at Eton, it 
has long been a common practice for small aris- 
tocrats to affect canes. 

The dandies, fops, exquisites, and beaux of 
[18] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

picturesque and courtly ages were, of course, very 
partial to canes, and sometimes wore them at- 
tached to the wrist by a thong. It has been the 
custom of the Surgeon of the King of England to 
carry a "Gold Headed Cane." This cane has 
been handed down to the various incumbents of 
this office since the days of Dr. John RadclifFe, 
who was the first holder of the cane. It has been 
used for two hundred years or more by the great- 
est physicians and surgeons in the world, who 
succeeded to it. "The Gold Headed Cane" was 
adorned by a cross-bar at the top instead of a 
knob. The fact is explained by Munk, in that 
Radcliffe, the first owner, was a rule unto him- 
self and possibly preferred this device as a mark 
of distinction beyond the knob used by physicians 
in general. Men of genius now and then have 
found in their choice of a cane an opportunity for 
the play of their eccentricity, such a celebrated 
cane being the tall wand of Whistler. Among 
the relics of great men preserved in museums for 
the inspiration of the people canes generally are 
to be found. We have all looked upon the 
cane of George Washington at Mount Vernon 
and the walking-stick of Carlyle in Cheyne Walk. 

[19] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

And is each not eloquent of the man who cher- 
ished it? 

Freak canes are displayed here and there by 
persons of a pleasantly bizarre turn of mind: 
canes encased in the hide of an elephant's tail, 
canes that have been intricately carven by some 
Robinson Crusoe, or canes of various other such 
species of curiosity. There is a veteran New 
York journalist who will be glad to show any 
student of canes one which he prizes highly that 
was made from the limb of a tree upon which a 
friend of his was hung. In our age of handy 
inventions a type of cane is manufactured in 
combination with an umbrella. 

Canes are among the useful properties of the 
theatre. He would be a decidedly incomplete 
villain who did not carry a cane. Imaginative 
literature is rich in canes. Who ever heard of 
a fairy godmother without a cane? Who with 
any feeling for terror has not been startled by 
the tap, tap of the cane of old Pew in "Treasure 
Island" ? There is an awe and a pathos in canes, 
too, for they are the light to blind men. And 
the romance of canes is further illustrated in 
this: they, with rags and the wallet, have been 
among the traditional accoutrements of beggars, 
[20] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

the insignia of the "dignity springing from the 
very depth of desolation; as to be naked is to be 
so much nearer to the being a man, than to go 
in Hvery." J. M. Barrie was so fond of an anec- 
dote of a cane that he employed it several times 
in his earlier fiction. This was the story of a 
young man who had a cane with a loose knob, 
which in society he would slyly shake so that it 
tumbled off, when he would exclaim: "Yes, that 
cane is like myself; it always loses its head in the 
presence of ladies." 

Canes have figured prominently in humour. 
The Irishman's shillelagh was for years a con- 
spicuous feature of the comic press. And there 
will instantly come to every one's mind that im- 
mortal passage in "Tristram Shandy." Trim 
is discoursing upon life and death: 

"Are we not here now, continued the Corporal 
(striking the end of his stick perpendicularly 
upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and 
stability) — and are we not (dropping his hat 
upon the ground) gone! in a moment! — 'Twas 
infinitely striking! Susannah burst into a flood 
of tears." 

Canes are not absent from poetry. Into your 

[21] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ears already has come the refrain of "The Last 
Leaf": 

"And totters o'er the ground, 
With his cane." 

And, doubtless, floods of instances of canes that 
the world will not willingly let die will occur to 
one upon a moment's reflection. 

Canes are inseparable from art. All artists 
carry them; and the poorer the artist the more 
attached is he to his cane. Canes are indispen- 
sable to the simple vanity of the Bohemian. One 
of the most memorable drawings of Steinlen de- 
picts the quaint soul of a child of the Latin 
Quarter: an elderly Bohemian, very much frayed, 
advances wreathed in the sunshine of his bouton- 
niere and cane. Canes are invariably an accom- 
paniment of learning. Sylvester Bonnard would 
of course not be without his cane ; nor would any 
other true book-worm, as may be seen any day 
in the reading-room of the British Museum and 
of the New York Public Library. It is, indeed, 
indisputable that canes, more than any other arti- 
cle of dress, are peculiarly related to the mind. 
There is an old book-seller on Fourth Avenue 
whose clothes when he dies, like the boots of 
[22] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

Michelangelo, probably will require to be pried 
loose from him, so incessantly has he worn them 
within the memory of man. None has ever 
looked upon him in the open air without his cane. 
And is not that emblem of omniscience and au- 
thority, the schoolmaster's ferule, directly of the 
cane family? So large has the cane loomed in 
the matter of chastisement that the word cane 
has become a verb, to cane. 

There was (in the days before the war) a mili- 
tary man (friend of mine) , a military man of the 
old school, in whom could be seen, shining like a 
flame, a man's great love of a cane. He had 
lived a portion of his life in South Amer- 
ica, and he used to promenade every pleasant 
afternoon up and down the Avenue swinging a 
sharply pointed, steel-ferruled swagger-stick. 
''What's the use of carrying that ridiculous thing 
around town?" some one said to him one day. 

"That!" he rumbled in reply (he was one of 
the roarers among men), "why, that's to stab 
scorpions with." 

They've buried him, I heard, in Flanders; on 
his breast (I hope), his cane. 

"When a Red Cross platoon," says a news 
despatch of the other day, "was advancing to the 

[23] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

aid of scores of wounded men, Surgeon William 
J. McCracken of the British Medical Corps or- 
dered all to take cover, and himself advanced 
through the enemy's fire, bearing a Red Cross 
flag on his walking-stick." 

Indeed, the Great War is one of the most 
thrilling, momentous and colourful chapters in 
the history of canes. "The officers picked up 
their canes," says the newspaper, and so forth, 
and so forth. Captain A. Radclyff e Dugmore, 
in a spirited drawing of the Battle of the Somme, 
shows an officer leading a charge waving a light 
cane. As an emblem of rank the cane among 
our Allies has apparently supplanted the sword. 
Something of the dapper, cocky look of our 
brothers in arms on our streets undoubtedly is 
due to their canes. One never sees a British, 
French or Italian officer in the rotogi-avure sec- 
tions without his cane. We should be as startled 
to see General Haig or the Prince of Wales with- 
out a cane as without a leg. With our own sol- 
diers the cane does not seem to be so much the 
thing, at least over here. I have a friend, how- 
ever, who went away a private with a rifle over 
his shoulder. The other day came news from 
him that he had become a sergeant, and, perhaps 
[24] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

as proof of this, a photograph of himself wearing 
a tin hat and with a cane in his hand. It is also 
to be observed now and then that a lady in uni- 
formed service appears to regard it as an added 
military touch to swing a cane. 

Women as well as men play their part in the 
colourful story of the cane. The shepherdess's 
crook might be regarded as the precursor of canes 
for ladies. In Merrie England in the age when 
the May-pole flourished it was fashionable, we 
know from pictures, for comely misses and 
grande dames to sport tall canes mounted with 
silver or gold and knotted with a bow of ribbon. 
The dowager duchess of romantic story has 
always appeared leaning upon her cane. Do not 
we so see the rich aunt of Rawden Crawley? 
And Mr. Walpole's Duchess of Wrexe, certainly, 
was supported in her domination of the old order 
of things by a cane. The historic old croons of 
our own early days smoked a clay or a corn-cob 
pipe and went bent upon a cane. 

In England to-day it is swagger for women to 
carry sticks — in the country. And here the 
thoughtful spectator of the human scene notes 
a nice point. It is not etiquette, according to 
English manners, for a woman to carry a cane in 

[25] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

town. Some American ladies who admire and 
would emulate English customs have not been 
made acquainted with this delicate nuance of 
taste, and so are very unfashionable when they 
would be ultra-fashionable. 

Anybody returning from the Alps should 
bring back an Alpine stock with him; every one 
who has visited Ireland upon his return has pre- 
sented some close friend with a blackthorn stick; 
nobody has made a walking tour of England 
without an ash stick. In London all adult males 
above the rank of costers carry "sticks"; in New 
York sticks are customary with many who would 
be ashamed to assume them did they live in the 
Middle West, where the infrequent sticks to be 
seen upon the city streets are in many cases the 
sign of transient mummers. And yet it is a 
curious fact that in communities where the stick 
is conspicuously absent from the streets it is com- 
monly displayed in show-windows, in company 
with cheap suits and decidedly loud gloves. An- 
other odd circumstance is this : trashy little canes 
hawked by sidewalk venders generally appear 
with the advent of toy balloons for sale on days 
of big parades. 

In Jamaica, Long Island, the visitor would 
[26] 



ON CARRYING A CANE 

probably see canes in the hands only of prosper- 
ous coloured gentlemen. And than this fact 
probably nothing throws more light on the win- 
ning nature of the coloured race, and on the 
character and function of canes. In San Fran- 
cisco — but the adequate story, the Sartor Resar- 
tus — the World as Canes, remains to be written. 
This, of course, is the merest essay into this 
rast and significant subject. 



[27] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

MEN of genius, blown by the winds of 
chance, have been, now and then, mariners, 
bar-keeps, schooknasters, soldiers, politicians, 
clerg}^men, and what not. And from these pur- 
suits have they sucked the essence of yarns and 
in the setting of these activities found a flavour to 
stir and to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a 
thousand pities that no man of genius has ever 
been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost 
great literaiy treasure, as it is highly probable 
that there is not under the sun any prospect so 
filled with the scents and colours of story as that 
presented by the commerce in fish. 

Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings 
on Front Street, out of paintings, I declare, by 
Howard Plye, where the large merchants in 
whale oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the 
oldest salt-fish house in America, down by 
Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of 
[28] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

old Long John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occa- 
sional pipe in that old place. And many are the 
times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim 
Hawkins come running out. Take Labrador 
cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or to 
Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings 
brought to this port from Iceland, from Holland, 
and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from 
the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; 
crabmeat from Japan; fishballs from Scandina- 
via; sardines from Norway and from France; 
caviar from Russia; shrimp which comes from 
Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia, or salmon 
from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Colum- 
bia River. 

Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his 
prime, it is said, there was not a better skipper 
in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters 
to schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew 
were landed, but lost all their belongings." New 
vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner Tillie 
B., whose career in the South Seas is well known, 
is reported to have been sold to a moving-picture 
firm." Sponges from the Caribbean Sea and the 
Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only 
with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it 

[29] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

comes from the sea would be rather um:'ecognis- 
able." Why, take anjrthing you please! It is 
such stuff as stories are. And as you eat your 
fish from the store how little do you reck of the 
glamour of what you are doing! 

However, as it seems to me unhkely that a 
man of genius will be a fish reporter shortly I 
will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry 
of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement 
in the newspaper read: "Wanted — Reporter for 
weekly trade paper.*' Many called, but I was 
chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew 
less about fish than I. 

The news stands are each like a fair, so laden 
are they with magazines in bright colours. It 
would seem almost as if there were a different 
magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth 
person, as the statistics put these matters. And 
yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very vast, periodi- 
cal literature of which we, that is, magazine 
readers in general, know nothing whatever. 
There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publica- 
tion. Barrel and Box, devoted tc the subjects and 
the interests of the coopering industry; there is, 
too, The Dried Fruit Packer and Western 
Canner, as alert a magazine as one could wish — 
[30] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

in its kind ; and from the home of classic Ameri- 
can literature comes The New England Trades- 
man and Grocer. And so on. At the place 
alone where we went to press twenty-seven trade 
jom'nals were printed every week, from one for 
butchers to one for bankers. 

The Fish Industries Gazette — Ah, yes I For 
some reason not clear (though it is an engaging 
thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the great 
word among the titles of trade journals. There 
are The Jewellers' Gazette and The Women s 
Wear Gazette and The Poulterers' Gazette 
(of London), and The Maritime Gazette (of 
Halifax), and other gazettes quite without 
number. This word "gazette" makes its ap- 
peal, too, curiously enough, to those who chris- 
ten country papers; and trade journals have 
much of the intimate charm of country 
papers. The "trade" in each case is a kind 
of neighbourly community, separated in its 
parts by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. 
"Personals" are a vital feature of trade papers. 
"Walter Conner, who for some time has con- 
ducted a bakery and fish market at Hudson, 
N. Y., has removed to Fort Edward, leaving his 

[31] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of 
business." 

The Fish Industries Gazette, as I say, was one 
of several in its field, in friendly rivalry with 
The Oyster Trade and Fisherman and The 
Pacific Fisheries. It comprized two depart- 
ments: the fresh fish and oyster department, and 
myself. I was, as an editorial announcement 
said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a 
"reorganisation of our salt, smoked, and pickled 
fish department." The delectable, mellow spirit 
of the country paper, so removed from the crash 
and whirr of metropolitan journalism, rested in 
this, too, that upon the Gazette I did practically 
everything on the paper except the linotyping. 
Reporter, editorial writer, exchange editor, 
make-up man, proof-reader, correspondent, ad- 
vertisement solicitor, was I. 

As exchange editor, did I read all the papers 
in the English language in eager search of fish 
news. And while you are about the matter, just 
find me a finer bit of literary style evoking the 
romance of the vast wastes of the moving sea, in 
Stevenson, Defoe, anywhere you please, than 
such a news item as this: "Capt. Ezra Pound, of 
the bark Ehwra, of Salem, Mass., spoke a lonely 
[82] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

vessel in latitude this and longitude that, Sep- 
tember 8. She proved to be the whaler Wan- 
derer,, and her captain said that she had been nine 
months at sea, that all on board were well, and 
that he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil." 

As exchange editor was it my business to 
peruse reports from Eastport, Maine, to the ef- 
fect that one of the worst storms in recent years 
had destroyed large numbers of the sardine weirs 
there. To seek fish recipes, of such savoury 
sound as those for "broiled redsnapper," "shrimps 
bordelaise," and "baked fish croqi^ettes." To 
follow fishing conditions in the North Sea 
occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down 
jokes of piscatory humour. "The man who 
drinks like a fish does not take kindly to water, — 
Exchange." To find other "fillers" in the consu- 
lar reports and elsewhere: "Fish culture in In- 
dia," "1800 Miles in a Dory," "Chinese Carp for 
the Philippines," "Americans as Fish Eaters." 
And, to use a favourite term of trade papers, 
"etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the winnowed 
fruits of this beguiling research. 

As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the 
commission recently sent by congress to the 
Pribilof Islands, Alaska, to report on the condi- 

[33] 



jWALking-stick papers 

tion of our national herd of fur seals; to discuss 
the official interpretation here of the Government 
ruling on what constitutes "boneless" codfish; to 
consider the campaign in Canada to promote 
there a more popular consumption of fish, and to 
brightly remark apropos of this that "a fish a day 
keeps the doctor away"; to review the current 
issue of The Journal of the Fisheries Society of 
Japan, containing leading articles on *'Are Fish- 
ing Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our 
Country" and "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. 
Yamaguchi Well Known"; to combat the preju- 
dice against dogfish as food, a prejudice like that 
against eels, in some quarters eyed askance as 
"calling cousins with the great sea-serpent," as 
Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom of 
one of the most picturesque monuments in the 
story of fish, the passing of the pleasant and cele- 
brated old Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near 
London, scene of the famous Ministerial white- 
bait dinners of the days of Pitt; to make a jest 
on an exciting idea suggested by some medical 
man that some of the features of a Ritz-Carlton 
Hotel, that is, baths, be introduced into the 
fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep 
an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisher- 
[3*] 



THE FISH REPORTEK 

ies; to hymn a praise to the monumental new 
Fish Pier at Boston; to glance at conditions at 
the premier fish market of the world, Billings- 
gate; to herald the fish display at the Canadian 
National Exhibition at Toronto, and, indeed, 
etc., and again etc. 

As general editorial roustabout, to find each 
week a "leader," a translation, say, from In 
Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitung , or Economic 
Circular No. 10, "Mussels in the Tributaries of 
the Missouri," or the last biennial report of the 
Superintendent of Fisheries of Wisconsin, or a 
scientific paper on "The Porpoise in Captivity" 
reprinted by permission of Zoologica, of the New 
York Zoological Society. To find each week for 
reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the 
feeling of the paper. One of the "Salt Water 
Ballads" would do, or John Masefield singing of 
"the whale's way," or "Down to the white dip- 
ping sails;" or Rupert Brooke: "And in that 
heaven of all their wish. There shall be no more 
land, say fish"; or a "weather rhyme" about 
"mackerel skies," when "you're sure to get a 
fishing day"; or something from the New York 
Sun about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver 
Herford, in the Century, "To a Goldfish"; or, 

[35] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

best of all, an old song of fishing ways of other 
days. 

And to compile from the New York Journal 
of Commerce better poetry than any of this, 
tables, beautiful tables of "imports into New 
York": "Oct. 15.— From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cut- 
tlefish bone; Copenhagen, 173 pkgs. fish; Liver- 
pool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus hides, 2,000 
bags salt; La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; Belize, 
9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7 pkgs. seaweed, 
9>000 kegs herrings ; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines ; 
Bocas Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 
boxes corals ; Tampico, 2 pkgs. sponges ; Halifax, 
1 cs. seal skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs. lob- 
sters, 490 bbls. codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. 
salted herrings," and much more. Beautiful 
tables of "exports from New York". "To Aus- 
tralia" (cleared Sep. 1) ; "to Argentina;" — 
Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, Scotland, Salvador, 
Santo Domingo, England, and to places many 
more. And many other gorgeous tables, too. 
"Fishing vessels at New York," for one, listing 
the "trips" brought into this port by the Stranger ^ 
the Sarah O'Neal, the Nourmahal, a farrago of 
charming sounds, and a valuable tale of facts. 

As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the 
[36] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

paper that the "markets," Oporto, Trinidad, 
Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be to- 
gether; that "Nova Scotia Notes" — "Weather 
conditions for curing have been more favourable 
since October set in" — would follow "Halifax 
Fish Market" — "Last week's arrivals were : Oct. 
13, schr. Hattie Loring, 960 quintals," etc. — that 
"Pacific Coast Notes"— "The tug Tatoosh will 
perform the service for the Seattle salmon pack- 
ers of towing a vessel from Seattle to this port 
via the Panama Canal" — would follow "Canned 
Salmon"; that shellfish matter would be in one 
place; reports of saltfish where such should be; 
that the weekly tale of the canned fish trade polit- 
ically embraced the canned fish advertising; and 
so on and so on. 

Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish 
reporter goes. There the sight-seeing cars never 
find their way ; the hurried commuter has not his 
path, nor knows of these things at all ; and there 
that racy character who, voicing a multitude, de- 
clares that he would rather be a lamp post on 
Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for 
to see. Up lower Greenwich Street the fish re- 
porter goes, along an eerie, dark, and narrow 
way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" 

[37] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

overhead. He threads his way amid seemingly- 
chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of barrels, 
crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags ; roundabout 
many great fetlocked draught horses, frequently 
standing or plunging upon the sidewalk, and 
attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and 
much of the time in the street he is compelled to 
go, finding the side walks too congested with the 
traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there. 
You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. 
Then you would delight in Greenwich Street. 
You could feast your highly creditable appetite 
for these excellent things for very nearly a solid 
mile upon the signs of "wholesale dealers and 
commission merchants" in them. The letter 
press, as you might say, of the fish reporter's 
walk is a noble paean to the earth's glorious yield 
for the joyous sustenance of man. For these 
princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores 
of olive oil, of sausages, beans, soups, extracts, 
and spices, sugar, Sj^anish, Bermuda, and 
Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, 
chocolates, dried fruits and raisins, and of loaves 
and of fishes, and of "fish products." Lo! dark 
and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is 
to-day's translation of the Garden of Eden. 
[88] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

Here is a great house whose sole vocation 
is the importation of caviar for barter here. 
Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes 
at all, mainly by the way of Archangel, recently 
put on the map, for most of us, by the war. The 
fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, 
that there cannot be much doing in the way of 
caviar until fall, "when the spoonbill start coming 
in." And on he goes to a great saltfish house, 
where many men in salt-stained garments are 
running about, their arms laden with large flat 
objects, of sharp and jagged edge, which resem- 
ble dried and crackling hides of some animal curi- 
ously like a huge fish; and numerous others of 
"the same" are trundling round wheelbarrow-like 
trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these 
hides stand on their tails against the walls, and 
goodness knows how many big boxes are, con- 
taining, as those open shoM% beautifully soft, 
thick, cream-coloured slabs, which is fish. And 
where still other men, in overalls stained like a 
painter's palette, are knocking off the heads of 
casks and dipping out of brine still other kinds 
of fish for inspection. 

Here it is said by the head of the house, by 
the stove (it is chill weather) in his office like a 

[39] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ship-master's cabin: "Strong market on foreign 
mackerel. Mines hinder Norway catch. Ad- 
vices from abroad report that German resources 
continue to purchase all available supplies from 
the Norwegian fishermen. No Irish of any ac- 
count. Recent shipment sold on the deck at high 
prices. Fair demand from the Middle West." 

So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore 
Street, looking down a narrow lane between two 
long bristling rows of wagons pointed out from 
the curbs, to the facades of the North River docks 
at the bottom, with the tops of the buff funnels 
of ocean liners, and Whistleranean silhouettes of 
derricks, rising beyond. Hereabout are more 
importers, exporters, and "producers" of fish, 
famous in their calling beyond 'the celebrities of 
popular publicity. And he that has official 
entree may learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half- 
ladder and half-stair, and by passing through 
low-ceilinged chambers freighted with many bar- 
rels, to the sanctums of the fish lords, what's do- 
ing in the foreign herring way, and get the cur- 
rent market quotations, at present sky-high, and 
hear that the American shore mackerel catch is 
very fine stock. 

Then roundabout, with a step into the broad 
[40] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

vista of homely Washington Street, and a turn 
through FrankHn Street, where is the man deco- 
rated by the Imperial Japanese Government with 
a gold medal, if he should care to wear it, for 
having distinguished himself in the development 
of commerce in the marine products of Japan, 
back to Hudson Street. An authentic railroad 
is one of the spectacular features of Hudson 
Street. 

Here down the middle of the way are endless 
trains, stopping, starting, crashing, laden to 
their ears with freight, doubtless all to eat. 
Tourists should come from very far to view 
Hudson Street. Here is a spectacle as fasci- 
nating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary as 
any in the world. From dawn until dark- 
ness falls, hour after hour, along Hudson 
Street slowly, steadily moves a mighty proces- 
sion of great trucks. One would not suppose 
there were so many trucks on the face of the 
earth. It is a glorious sight, and any man whose 
soul is not dead should jump with joy to see it. 
And the thunder of them altogether as they bang 
over the stones is like the music of the spheres. 

There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome 
building where the fish reporter goes, which 

[41] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

should be enjoyed in this way: Up in the lift you 
go to the top, and then you walk down, smacking 
your lips. For all the doors in that building are 
brimming with poetry. And the tune of it goes 
like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.," "Seaboard 
Rice," "Chili Products," "Red Bloom Grape 
Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore 
Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Im- 
porters of Fruit Pulps, Pimentos," "Sole Agents 
U. S. A. Itahan Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers," 
"Log Cabin Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," 
"Chocolate and Cocoa Preparations," "Ohio 
Evaporated Milk Co.," "Bernese Alps and Hol- 
land Condensed Milk Co.," "Brazilian Nuts Co.," 
"Brokers Pacific Coast Salmon," "California 
Tuna Co.," and thus on and on. 

The fish reporter crosses the street to see the 
head of the Sardine Trust, who has just thrown 
the market into excitement by a heavy cut in 
prices of last year's pack. Therice, pausing to 
refresh himself by the way at a sign "Agency for 
Reims Champagne and Moselle Wines — Bor- 
deaux Clarets and Sauternes," over to Broad- 
way to interview the most august persons of all, 
dealers in fertiliser, "fish scrap." These mighty 
gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial 
[42] 



THE FISH REPORTER 

suites of offices constructed of marble and fine 
woods and laid with rich rugs. The reporter is 
relayed into the innermost sanctum by a succes- 
sion of richly clothed attendants. And he learns, 
it may be, that fishing in Chesapeake Bay is so 
poor that some of the "fish factories" may decide 
to shut down. Acid phosphate, it is said, is rul- 
ing at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore. 

And so the fish reporter enters upon the last 
lap of his rounds. Through, perhaps, the nar- 
row, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to 
come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale. 
Here would a lad, heir to vast estates in Virginia, 
be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to be sold a 
slave in Africa. This is Front Street. A white 
ship lies at the foot of it. Cranes rise at her side. 
Tugs, belching smoke, bob beyond. All about 
are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, 
with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, 
and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in 
each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other 
things dealt in hereabout are these : chronometers, 
"nautical instruments," wax gums, cordage and 
twine, marine paints, cotton wool and waste, tur- 
pentine, oils, greases, and rosin. Queer old 
taverns, public houses, are here, too. Why do 

[43] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

not their windows rattle with a "Yo, ho, ho"? 
There is an old, old house whose business has 
been fish oil within the memory of men. And 
here is another. Next, through Water Street, 
one comes in search of the last word on salt fish. 
Now the air is filled with gorgeous smell of roast- 
ing coffee. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, spices, bags 
and bagging here have their home. And there 
are haughty bonded warehouses filled with fine 
liquors. From his white cabin at the top of a 
venerable structure comes the dean of the salt- 
fish business. "Export trade fair," he says; 
*'good demand from South America." 



[44] 



n 

ON GOING A JOURNEY 

ONE of the pleasantest things in the world 
is "going a journey" — but few know it 
now. It isn't every one that can go a journey. 
No doubt one that owns an automobile cannot go. 
The spirit of the age has got him fast. Begog- 
gled and with awful squawks, feverish, exultant, 
ignorant, he is condemned to hoot over the earth. 
Thus the wealthy know nothing of journeys, for 
they must own motors. Vain people and envious 
people and proud people cannot go, because the 
wealthy do not. Silly people do not know 
enough to go. The lazy cannot, because of their 
laziness. The busy hang themselves with busi- 
ness. The halt nor the aged, alas! cannot go. 
In fine, only such as are whole and wise and pure 
in heart can go a journey, and they are the 
blessed. 

"We arrive at places now, but we" (most of 
us) "travel no more." The way a journey is 

[45] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

gone, to come to the point, is walking. Asking 
many folks' pardon, to tear through the air in an 
open car, deafened, hilariously muddled by the 
rush and roar of wind, is to drive observation 
from the mind : it is to be, in a manner, compla- 
cently, intellectually unconscious; is to drink an 
enjoyment akin to that of the shooters of the 
chute, or that got on the very latest of this sort 
of engine of human amusement called the "Hully- 
Gee-Whizz," a pleasure of the ignorant, meta- 
phorically, a kind of innocents' rot-gut whiskey. 
The way a journey is gone, which is walking, is 
a wine, a mellow claret, stimulating to observa- 
tion, to thought, to speculation, to the flow of 
talk, gradually, decently warming the blood. 
Rightly taken (which manner this paper at- 
tempts to set forth), walking is among the 
pleasures of the mind. It is a call-boy to wit, a 
hand-maiden to cultivation. Sufficiently in- 
dulged in, it will make a man educated, a wit, a 
poet, an ironist, a philosopher, a gentleman, a 
better Christian (not to dwell upon improving 
his digestion and prolonging his life) . And, too, 
like true Shandyism "it opens the heart and the 
^ungs." Whoso hath ears, let him hear! Once 
and for all, if the mad world did but know it, 
[46] 



ON GOING A JOURNEY 

the best, the most exquisite automobile is a walk- 
ing-stick; and one of the finest things in life is 
going a journey with it. 

No one, though (this is the first article to be 
observed), should ever go a journey with any 
other than him with whom one walks arm in 
arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking 
(let us suppose) of men's given names, agrees 
that if either should have a son he shall be named 
after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, 
two and two, since the world began, there have 
always been young men who have thus to one 
another plighted their troth. If one is not still 
one of these, then, in the sense here used, jour- 
neys are over for him. What is left to him of 
life he may enjoy, but not journeys. Mention 
should be made in passing that some have been 
found so ignorant of the nature of journeys as 
to suppose that they might be taken in company 
with members, or a member, of the other sex. 
Now, one who writes of journeys would cheer- 
fully be burned at the stake before he would 
knowingly underestimate women. But it must 
be confessed that it is another season in the life 
of man that they fill. 

They are too personal for the high enjoyment 

[47] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

of going a j ourney. They must be forever think- 
ing about you or about themselves; with them 
everything in the world is somehow tangled up 
in these matters; and when you are with them 
(you cannot help it, or if you could they would 
not allow it) , you must be forever thinking about 
them or yourself. Nothing on either side can 
be seen detached. They cannot rise to that philo- 
sophic plane of mind which is the very marrow 
of going a journey. One reason for this is that 
they can never escape from the idea of society. 
You are in their society, they are in yours ; and the 
multitudinous personal ties which connect you all 
to that great order called society that you have 
for a period got away from physically are pres- 
ent. Like the business man who goes on a vaca- 
tion from business and takes his business habits 
along with him, so on a journey they would bring 
society along, and all sort of etiquette. 

He that goes a journey shakes off the tram- 
mels of the world ; he has fled all impediments and 
inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, to 
no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, 
but in that which he^ thinks and sees. There is 
not such another Arcadia for this on earth as in 
going a journey. He that goes a journey es- 
[48] 



ON GOING A JOURNEY 

capes, for a breath of air, from all conventions; 
without which, though, of course, society would 
go to pot ; and which are the very natural instinct 
of women. 

The best time for going a journey (a connois- 
seur speaks it) is some morning when it has 
rained well the day or night before, and the soil 
of the road, where it is not evenly packed, is of 
about that substance of which the fingers can 
make fine "tees" for golfing. This is the precise 
composition of earth and dampness underfoot 
most sympathetic to the spine, the knee sockets, 
the muscles, tendons, ligaments of limb, back, 
neck, breast and abdomen, and the spirit of loco- 
motion in the ancient exercise of walking. On 
this day the protruding stones have been washed 
bald in the road ; the lines and marks of drainage 
are still clearly, freshly defined in the soil ; in the 
gutters light-coloured sand has risen to the sur- 
face with the dark moist soil in a grained effect 
not unlike marbled chocolate cake; and clean, 
sweet gravel is laid bare here and there in the 
wagon ruts. This is the chosen time for the 
nerves and senses. On such a day the whole 
world greets one cleansed and having on a fresh 
bib-and-tucker. It is a conscious pleasure to have 

[49] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

eyes. It is as if one long near-sighted without 
knowing it had suddenly been fitted with the 
proper spectacles. It is sweet to have olfactories. 
Whoso hath lungs, let him breathe. Man was 
made to rejoice! 

How green, on such a day, are the greens ; the 
distant purples how purple ! The stone walls are 
cool. The great canvas of the sky has been but 
newly brushed in, as if by some modern land- 
scape painter (the tube colours seem yet hardly 
dry) ; the technique, the brush-marks, show in the 
unutterably soft, warm- white clouds; or, like a 
puff of beaten-egg white, wells above that or- 
chard hill. Higher up, thinly touched across the 
blue, a gi-eat sweep of downy, swan breast-breast 
feathers spreads. But not one canvas is this sky; 
ceaselessly it changes with the minutes. To ob- 
serve is to walk through an endless gallery of 
countless pictures. It is alone a life-study. 
Now the wind has blown it clear as blue limpid- 
ness ; now scattered flakes appear ; now it is deep 
blue; now pale; now it tinges darkly; now it is 
a layer of cream. Again, it breaks into shapes — 
decorative shapes, odd shapes, lovely shapes, 
shapes always fresh. Its innovations are unflag- 
[50] 



ON GOING A JOURNEY 

ging, inexhaustable. Always art, its genius is 
infinite. 

One must go a journey to discover how vast 
the sky really is, and the world. To mount, 
bending forward, up by a long, tree-walled ascent 
from some valley, and come upon this spectacu- 
lar sight — the fair globe that man inhabits lying 
away before one like a gigantic physical map, a 
map in relief, cunningly painted in the colours 
of nature, laid off by woods and orchards and 
roads and stone walls into many decorative 
shapes until it melts into purple, and fainter and 
fainter and still fainter purple Japanese hills. 
The sight is some of the noble quarry, the game ; 
this is the anise-seed bag of him that goes a jour- 
ney. Some glimmering of the nobility of the 
plan of which he is a fell, erring speck comes over 
one as he looks. This is the religious side of 
going a journey. 

It is best to go a journey on a road that you 
do not know ; on a road that lures you on to peep 
over the crest of yonder hill, that ever flees before 
you in a game of hide-and-seek, disappearing be- 
hind great, jutting rocks and turns and trees, to 
leap out again at your approach and laughingly, 
elusively, continually slip before you ; a road that 

[51] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

winds anon where some roaring brook pours near 
by; a road that may deceive you and trick you 
into miles out of your way. 

A high breeze rushes through the trees and 
fans the traveller's opened pores. With a sud- 
den, startling whir, mounting with their hearts, a 
bird flushes from the tangled growth at the road- 
side. 

The worst roads for walking are such as are 
commonly caUed the best; that is, macadam. A 
macadam pavement is a piece of masonry, wholly 
without elasticity, built for vehicles to roll over. 

To go a journey without a walking-stick much 
would be lost ; indeed it would be folly. A stick 
is the fly-wheel of the engine. Something iw 
needed to whack things with, little stones, wormy 
apples, and so forth, in the road. It can b^ 
changed from one hand to the other, which is a 
great help. Then if one slips a trifle on a down- 
grade turn it is a lengthened arm thrown out to 
steady one. It is the pilgrim's staff. On the 
up-grades it assists climbing. It is a weapon of 
defence if such should ever be needed. It is a 
badge of dignity, a dress sword. It is the sceptre 
of walking. 

Dipping the dales, riding the swells, the auto- 
[52] 



ON GOING A JOURNEY 

mobiles come, like gigantic bugs coming after the 
wicked. With a sucking rush of wind and dust 
and an odour of gasoline they are past. Stray 
pieces of paper at the roadside arise and fly after 
them, then, further on, sink impotent, exhausted. 

"I have found that no exertion of the legs can 
bring two minds much nearer to one another!" 
One who goes much a- journeying cannot under- 
stand how Thoreau got it so completely turned 
around. But after the first effervescence of go- 
ing a journey (of speech a time of times) has 
passed, and when, next, the fine novelty of open 
observation has begun to pale, there are still copi- 
ous resources left; one retires on the way, meta- 
phorically speaking, into one's closet for medita- 
tion, for miles of silent thought — ^when one's 
stride is mechanical, and is like an absent-minded 
drumming with the fingers ; but that it is better, 
for it pimips the blood for freer thought than in 
lethargic sitting. 

In this rhythmic moving one thinks as to a 
tune. To sit thus absolutely silent, absent in 
thought completely, even with that friend one 
wears in one's heart's core, will at length become 
dull for one or other ; sitting thus one is tempted, 
too, to speech. Walking, it is not so. One may 

[53] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

talk or one may not. If both wish to think, both 
feel as if something sociable is being done in just 
walking together. If one does not care to go 
wool-gathering, the other does not leave him 
without entertainment; walking alone is enter- 
tainment. It is assumed, of course, that one 
goes a journey in silence as in speech with the 
companion ^vith whom one has been best seasoned. 
Silently walking, the movement of the mind 
keeps step in thought exactly with the movement 
of the man, so that the pace is a thermometer of 
the temperature at that moment of one's brain. 

One who has written on going a journey as 
well perhaps as the world will ever see it done 
owned that he never had had a watch. Further, 
he intimated that the possession of one was an 
indication of poverty of mental resource. It was 
his own wont, he said, to pass hours, whole days, 
unconscious of the flight of time. He described 
his father as taking out his watch to look at when- 
ever he could think of nothing else to do. His 
father, our author says, was no metaphysician. 
It must be confessed that one now writing of 
journeys, sometimes, somewhat unmetaphysician- 
like, conscious of the flight of time, has communi- 
cation with a watch; and, finding the day well 
[54] 



ON GOING A JOURNEY 

advanced, decides, speaking very figuratively, to 
lay the cloth, beneath some twisted, low, gnarled 
apple tree. 

"At the next shadow," he suggests. 

"Let's wait until we get to the top of this hill, 
first." 

"Here we are." 

Sweet rest! when one throws one's members 
down upon the turf and there lets them lie, as 
if they were so many detached packages dropped. 
Then one feels the exquisite nerve luxury of hav- 
ing legs : while one rests them. One's back could 
lie thus prone forever. One feels, sucking all 
the rich pleasure of it, that one couldn't move 
one's arms, lift one's hand, if one had to. What 
are the world's rewards if this is not one! 

At length in going a journey comes a time 
when one tiredly shrinks from the work of speech, 
when observation dozes, and thought lolls like a 
limp sail that only idly stirs at the passing 
zephyrs ; the legs like piston-rods strike on ; when 
the pleasure is like that almost of dull narcotics ; 
one realises only dimly that one is moving. At 
such times as these, coming from one knows not 
whence, and one feels too weak to search back to 
discover, there flit across the mind strange frag- 

[55] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ments, relevant, as they seem, to nothing what- 
ever present. 

When a journey has been made one way, the 
trick has been done ; the superfluous energy which 
inspired it has found escape; the way to return 
is not by walking. A friend to fatigue is this, that 
in walking back one is not on a voyage of dis- 
covery; one knows the way and very much what 
one will see on it; one knows the distance. In 
fact, the fruit has been plucked: the bloom is 
gone ; to walk back would be like tedious march- 
ing with a regiment. One should return resting. 
On trains one returns from a journey. 

Whoso hath life, one thinks as his journey 
draws to its close, let him live it! What does it 
profit a man, if he gain the whole world and never 
know his own soul? 



[56] 



Ill 

GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

THERE are two opposing views as to going 
to art exhibitions. And much with a good 
deal of reason may be said on both sides. There 
is one very vigorous attitude which holds that the 
pictures are the thing. This, indeed, is a per- 
fectly ponderable theory. But it may be ques- 
tioned whether in its ardour it does not go a little 
far. For it affirms that people are a con- 
founded nuisance at art exhibitions, and should 
not be permitted to be there, to distract one's at- 
tention from the peaceful contemplation of works 
of art, and to infuriate one by their asinine re- 
marks in the holy presence of beauty. I have 
heard it declared with very impressive spirit, and 
reasoned with much force, that only one person, 
or at most only one person and his chosen com- 
panion, should be allowed in an art gallery at a 
time. It is debatable, however, whether this in- 
tellectually aristocratic idea is altogether prac- 

[57] 



WALKING-STIGK PAPERS 

ticable. On the other hand, was it not even Lit- 
tle Billie who found the people at art exhibitions 
frequently more interesting than the pictures? 

Anyhow, persons who write about art exhibi- 
tions confine themselves exclusively to the sub- 
ject of art. When they gossip it is about the 
pictures, the painters, and the sculpture. True, 
of course, this is their job, and then, these per- 
sons go on press days and so only see, outside of 
that which is intentionally exhibited, other critics. 

Now, there is nothing in all the world quite 
like art exhibitions. Beyond any other sort of 
show they possess a spirit which (to use a pet 
and an excellent critical expression of one of our 
foremost art critics) is "grand, gloomy, and pe- 
culiar." You feel this charged atmosphere at 
once at an art exhibition. You walk softly, you 
speak low, and you endeavour to become as in- 
telligent as possible. Art exhibitions, in short, 
present various features indigenous to themselves 
which, so far as I am aware, have not before been 
adequately commented upon. The principal 
observations which they solicit are as follows : 

First, art exhibitions are attended by two 
classes of people: very fine-looking people, and 
funny-looking people. There is a very striking 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

kind of a young man goes to art exhibitions that 
I myself never accomplish seeing anj^-where else, 
though sometimes I see pictures of him. This 
young man is superbly patrician. You may have 
remarked this singular phenomenon. All the 
young men in all the advertisements in the maga- 
zine Vanity Fair are the same young man, 
whether riding in a splendid motor car, elegantly 
attending the play, or doing a little shooting of 
birds. You know him, for one thing, by his ex- 
quisite moustache. This fastidiously groomed, 
exclusively tailored young man, to be seen in the 
pages spoken of and at art exhibitions, is cer- 
tainly not of Art, nor is he of business. He takes 
no account whatever, apparently, of time, as men 
of business do ; and manifestly one could not work 
in such a moustache and such clothes without 
mussing them. He is, in fine, of Vanity Fair. 
Oscar Wilde was, as usual, wrong when he said 
that all beautiful things were quite useless. This 
immaculate young man's practical function at 
art exhibitions, as perhaps elsewhere, is that of 
escort. 

He is escort to groups of very handsome and 
very expensive-looking young ladies; and these 
fragrant, rustling groups, with the waxen, patri- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

cian young man in tow, stroll slowly about, cata- 
logues unnoticed in hand, without pause skirting 
the picture-hung walls. They are very still, and 
they gaze upon the art that they pass with the 
look of a doe contemplating the meaning of the 
appearance of a man. The perfect escorts of 
these groups, who would seem naturally to be 
rather gay young men, look very serious indeed. 
Now one of them gracefully, though as if careful 
not to make any noise, bends to one of the young 
ladies; and, indicating by a solemn look one of 
the paintings, he whispers to her apparently con- 
cerning it. She silently nods: it is, evidently, 
quite as he says. When an art exhibition is so 
undertakery a thing you wouldn't think that one 
would come. Though perhaps it is that one 
ought. 

At any rate, there is quite a tm'n-out to-day 
moving beneath the ghostly glow of the shrouded 
sky-light ceiling. Half the Avenue seems to be 
here. What a play it is, this highly urban 
throng! Let us sit here on this divan down the 
middle of the room. With what a stately march 
the pictures go in their golden frames along the 
symphonious, burlap walls! There, by that 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

copious piece of intelligence, Manet's "Music 
Lesson," is — 

But see! What has come over our earnest 
group? Those who compose it are all quite 
changed. They look as happy as can be, all 
beaming with smiles, their backs to the neigh- 
bouring walls. Friends, it seems, have greeted 
them. How they all bubble on, all about the 
outside world! But goodness! Now what is 
the matter? Suddenly one of the newcomers is 
struck by a startled look. She sees, that is it, 
one of the pictures. In an arrested voice she 
says: "Oh, isn't that perfectly lovely!" At once 
the happy light fades from the faces of aU. An 
awed hush falls upon them as stiffly they turn 
their heads in the direction of her view. "Charm- 
ing!" one of the young men breathes, staring in- 
tently at the painting which has come upon them. 
That it is awkward for everybody is plain. But, 
happily, there is much rebound to youth. One 
of the young ladies, at length, shakes herself free 
from the pall upon her spirits ; the mesmeric spell 
is broken; and presently all are chatting again, 
gaily oblivious to Art. 

By the way, there is the proprietor of the 
gallery, just before the three Renoir pastels. Is 

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there anything ahout art exhibitions that more 
enhsts the imagination than the study of the 
"dealers" themselves? The gentlemen who pre- 
side at art exhibitions fall, rather violently, into 
three, perhaps four, classes. You have, I dare 
say, been repeatedly struck by the quaintly inap- 
propriate character in appearance of those of one 
of these classes. I mean, of course, those very 
horsey-looking men, with decidedly "hard" faces, 
loudly dressed, and dowered with hoarse voices. 
They would seem to be boolanakers, exceedingly 
prosperous publicans, bunco-brokers, militant 
politicians — anything save of the Kingdom of 
Art. Are their polished Bill Sykes' exteriors 
but bizarre domiciles for lofty souls? I cannot 
tell. 

Here and there, it is true, you find the aesthete 
in effect among dealers: the wired moustaches, 
the spindle-legged voice, and the ardent spu'it in 
discussing his wares with lady visitors. Our 
horsey type seems rather ponderous and phleg- 
matic in this matter. Then there is, too, a kind of 
art exhibition which is very close indeed to Art, a 
kind of spirited propaganda, in fact, which is pi*e- 
sided over by those of hierarchical character, be- 
ings as to hah* and cravat, swai'thv complexion 



GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

and mystic gesticulation, holy from the world 
and mocked by the profane. 

But, to my mind, the most satisfying sort of 
a host to observe at an art exhibition is that of the 
description of this admirable dealer before us. 
Benign, frock-coated, hands clasped behind him, 
he stands, symbol of gentlemanly, merchantly 
dignity. Occasionally he rises upon his toes, and 
then sinks again to his heels obviously with satis- 
faction. But that which proclaims the perfect 
equity of his mind is this : his nice recognition of 
the nuances in human kind. You perceive that 
his bow to each of his guests, that he recognises 
at all, is graduated according to the precise de- 
gree of that person's value to Art; that to some 
few, royal patrons presumably, being at an angle 
of forty-five degrees ; while a common amateur of 
Art is acknowledged by one of five. Where — to 
continue the paraphrase of a pleasant observa- 
tion upon Mr. George Brummell — it is a mere 
question of recognising the fact that a certain 
person dwells on the same planet with Art "a 
slight relaxation of the features" is made to 
suffice. 

So! This profound bow is plainly meant for 
a particular tribute to one who wears the richest 

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purple. Lo! He advances with unclasped 
hands. Pleasure beams from his countenance. 
Without such as she Art, and dealers, and gal- 
leries, and the recorded beauty of the world 
would perforce pass away. This entertaining 
personage, who is the great flurry at art exhibi- 
tions, is of the novelists' dowager Duchess type. 
A short, obese, and jovial figure, or dried and 
withered but imperious distinction, as the case 
may be. There is much crackling of fine gar- 
ments, a brilliant display of lorgnette, and this 
penetrating and comprehensive royal critical dic- 
tum : "Isn't that interesting 1 So full of feeling." 
Two outstanding features, you mark, of art ex- 
hibitions everywhere are here presented. Is any 
one who doesn't know what he is talking about 
at art exhibitions (and which of us does?) prop- 
erly equipped for attendance there without this 
happy esoteric phrase "full of feeling"? It is 
safe, or as safe as anything can be, to say about 
any picture. It graphically indicates in the 
speaker delicate sensitivity and emotional re- 
sponsiveness to Art. And, most beneficently, 
it subtly evades anything like the trying ordeal 
of an analysis of a work of art. It is, indeed, 
invaluable. 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

The other thing is this : There is no place go- 
ing which is so well adapted to the exhibition of 
handsome, fashionable, or eccentric eye-glasses 
as an art exhibition. You observe there all that 
is newest and classy in glasses, and you are insist- 
ently invited to admiring study of the art of 
wearing queer glasses effectively, and of taking 
them off, letting them bound on their leash, 
doubling them up, opening them out, and putting 
them on with a gesture. 

The complimentary type co the storied Duchess 
at art exhibitions is represented by yonder portly 
blood, in this case a replica of the late King 
Edward. The fruitful spectacle of art exhibi- 
tions, I think, presents nothing which gives one 
a more gratifying sense of their dignity and of 
the imperial character of Art than the presence 
there of these patently highly solvent, ruddy 
jowel*^d, admirably tailored, and impressively 
worldly looking connoisseurs of painting to be 
seen scrutinising the pictures at close range, in a 
near-sighted way, and rather grimly, as though 
somewhat sceptically appraising possibly dubi- 
ous merchandise. 

Hello, there's Mr. Chase! And that's a for- 
tunate thing, too, as no sympathetic picture of a 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

representative American art exhibition should 
omit Mr. Chase. Whether or not we think of 
him as our premier painter, we should be inordi- 
nately proud of him. Undoubtedly he is a great 
artist. He has wrought himself in the grand 
manner. In person he delights the eye, and 
satisfies the imagination. With his inevitable 
top-hat, his heavy eye-glasses cord, his military 
moustaches and upward pointing beard, his 
pouter-pigeon carriage, his glowing spats and his 
boutonniere, his aroma of distinction, and his 
ruddy consciousness of his prestige, he is our 
great tour-de-force as a figure in the artistic 
scene. He is here, naturally, now the target of 
popular interest. 

The practice of having artists shown at their 
own exhibitions is one too little cultivated. The 
Napoleonic brow and the Napoleonic forelock 
(famous in their circle) of George Luks, the tor- 
rential Luksean mirth, how would not their ac- 
tual presence open the spiritual eyes of visiting 
school-children to the humane qualities of the 
works of the Luksean genius! And why should 
w^e who procure for our better perception of their 
works illuminating biographies of the Old 
Masters not be permitted the intellectual stimu- 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

lation of beholding the Ten American Painters 
seated along on a bench at their annual show? 
The subject of the artists themselves, however, 
brings us around to the line between the two 
kinds of people having to do with art exhibitions : 
fine-looking people and funny-looking people. 

Come; let us trot along. Artists themselves 
are, in a most pronounced degree, of both kinds. 
And a very singular thing is this : the funnier an 
artist's pictures are, the funnier-looking is the 
artist that made them. We'll stop in here, at 
The Advanced Gallery. 

"Ah I How are you?" 

That, just going out, is one of the newest 
groups of painters, known as the Homeopathics. 
I used to know him before he went abroad. And 
the curious thing is, that at that time he was very 
good-looking. He was clean shaven. This 
strange assortment of whiskers of different 
fashions on various parts of his face, imperial, 
goatee, burnsides, he brought back with him. 

Notice as we step from the car at the gallery 
floor the numerous others here who also were at 
the show we just left. And those who are thus 
making the rounds, you perceive, are not of what 
is caUed society, but of the kind known in these 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

circles, doubtless, as interesting. Nearly every- 
body in this gallery, in fact, is of the interesting 
sort. At once it is apparent that there is nothing 
of the perfunctory here. Art is vital, Art is 
earnest. The atmosphere is tense. The young 
women are clad in a manner giving much free- 
dom to the movement of their bodies. They 
walk with a stride. Their clothes are not of the 
mode of the Avenue, but they have — ^how shall I 
say? To twist what Whistler said of his model: 
Character, character is what these clothes have. 
They suggest, many of these young women, the 
type that has never got back from — 

"Do you know Chelsea at all?" asks one of 
them, of an anarchic-looking young man. 

Never got back, as I was about to say, from 
Chelsea. A couple of other anarchic-looking 
young men are viewing a painting in the man- 
ner that a painting, or perhaps this particular 
painting, is intended to be viewed; that is by 
squinting at it first over the tops of their hands 
and then through their fingers. They discuss it 
darkly, in low, passionate tones. They advance 
upon it; and, a few inches before it, one, as 
though holding a brush in his hand, sweeps elo- 
quently with his arm, following the contour of 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

the painted figure. Legerdemain kind of things 
painting, isn't it? Sort of a black art, when you 
see into the science of it. 

WeU, I declare! Here's a friend of mine — 
there, talking with the Titian-haired lady in the 
exotic gown. Now, he is coming over to us. 

He says he wants us to know Ben-Gunn, who 
is here, "one of the new crowd," he says. My 
friend is very keen on the new crowd ; everything 
else he declares is "passe." Anyhow, it is a very 
valuable experience to talk with an exhibitor at 
an art exhibition. Your mind is impregnated, 
until it swells dizzily in your head. That would 
be he, the illiterate-looking little creature with 
the uncombed and unsanitary-looking mop. 

There ! I knew he would say something, some- 
thing that would never leave you again the same. 
"Nothing is shiny in Nature," says Mr. Ben- 
Gunn as though rather depressed, surveying a 
canvas in this respect unhappily divorced from 
the truth. "Nature," he adds with Brahminic 
finality, "is always dull." 

Mr. Ben-Gunn is greeted affectionately by a 
gentleman you always see at every art exhibi- 
tion. This is Mr. — I forget his name — it is 
French; I know he writes on Art for Demos; a 

[69] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

remarkable being who apparently talks, hears, 
and sees nothing else but cestheticism. For as 
there are types peculiar to art exhibitions, so 
there are certain individuals apparently quite pe- 
culiar to art exhibitions. Come, let us go on 
down to see some Old Masters. Notice there in 
the corner the foreign-looking gentleman with 
the three foreign-looking children. That, the 
quiet, cultivated, foreign father and his children, 
is one of the pleasantest sights frequently to be 
seen at art exhibitions. Thus he is to be seen, 
easily and intimately discussing the pictures with 
his attentive followers. 

The gi-eat point about the study of art exhi- 
bitions from the point of view of the humanist is 
the affinity between pictures and people. Here, 
for instance, on Madison Square, amid the art 
heritage of times past, what is it that at once 
strikes you? Why, that old paintings evidently 
are quite passe to the new crowd. At these ex- 
hibitions preliminary to the big auction sales of 
venerable masters, and of middle-aged masters, 
and of venerable and middle-aged not-quite-mas- 
ters, there is a very attractive class of people, a 
class of funny-looking, fine-looking people, a 
class, that is, of rather shabbj-looking people 
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GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

who look as if they might be very rich, of dull- 
looking people who look as if they might be very 
bright. They buy huge catalogues at a dollar 
or so apiece, which they consult continually. 
They arrive early and remain a long time. 

The women of this audience frequently are 
rather dowdy, and shapen in very individual 
fashions. The men generally are elderly beings, 
now and then reminiscent of the period of Hor- 
ace Greeley. They are very bald, or with un- 
trimmed white (not grey) hair, and, sometimes. 
Uncle- Sam-like whiskers. They are usually very 
wrinkled as to trowsers and overcoats. Here 
and there among the gentlemen of this company 
is to be seen one who looks strikingly like Emile 
Zola, or the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan slightly 
gone to seed. All these charming folk make 
of looking at old-fashioned pictures a very busy 
occupation, and also in effect a rather mundane 
occupation, as though they were alertly consider- 
ing the possibility of making a selection from 
among a variety of serviceable kitchen chairs. 

Argumenting the throng are authentic repre- 
sentatives of the world of fashion ; some who ap- 
pear to be students; the ever present foreigners, 
including the frequently present Jap ; a number 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

of those enigmatic beings who continually take 
notes at art exhibitions; and a respectable quota 
of those ladies we always have with us at art ex- 
hibitions who in the presence of pictures find it 
necessary to say: "Isn't that wonderful, marvel- 
lous tone quality!" Occasionally a decidedly 
quaint student of Art strolls in, past the imposing 
flunky (in finery a bit faded) at the door, strolls 
in in the form of a lodger in Madison Square. 
He looks at the pictures as if thoughtfully, but 
without animation. 

Well, we have now covered, in an elementary 
way, about every important species of art show, 
except one, the most human perhaps of all, that 
held annually on Fifty-seventh Street. We 
should hardly have time to go up there to-day. 
I'll tell you about it. There are several reasons 
why this exhibition is the most human perhaps of 
all. One is that more people go than to any 
other. And these people, taken by and large, are 
more himian, too, than one sees at most art ex- 
hibitions, that is more like just ordinary people. 
This may be, for one thing, because the pictures 
as a rule are more ordinary pictures. And a very 
human touch, indeed, is this: when you see the 
card "Sold" on a painting it is fairly certain to 
[72] 



GOING TO ART EXHIBITIONS 

be one of the most ordinary pictures of the lot. 

That reminds one of museums. People who 
are called in the world to the curious pm-suit 
of copying pictures in museums, for some reason 
or other which I have been unable as yet to work 
out, apparently always copy the most bourgeois 
pictures there. But museums, with their 
throngs of subdued holiday makers and their 
crowds of weary gaping aliens of the submerged 
order, museums comprise a separate study. 

At any rate, I hope in our stroll I have been 
able to give you a new insight into the fascina- 
tion of the great world of Art. 



[73] 



IV 

A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

NO reader of The Spectator will have for- 
gotten an article which appeared there 
some years ago entitled "As to Bears." Or 
ever will forget it until his shall be "the shut lid 
and the granite lip of him who has done with sun- 
sets and skating, and has turned away his face 
from all manner of Irish," as William Vaughn 
Moody says. Not only because it was one of the 
finest things ever in The Spectator, or anywhere 
else (after, possibly, that imperishable disserta- 
tion of the great Dean's — or was it Sir William 
Temple's? — "On a Broomstick"), but also be- 
cause it was one pure flower in our day of a kind 
of art little cultivated any more. "As to Bears." 
Ah, me! How engaging, simple, gracious, and 
at ease; what perfection of literary breeding; 
what an amused and genial wave of the finger 
tips; how marked by good-humoured acuteness, 
and animated nonchalance ; how saturated with a 
[74] 



A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

distinguished, humane tradition of letters — ^that 
title! 

That is just the note I would strike in the 
great book I have been brooding for years, 
"Bums I Have Known." It has been my felicity 
to have known more bums, I think, than any liv- 
ing man. But I fear I shall never get that book 
written. And this is a pity. It is a pity be- 
cause this book would be of great value in the 
years to come. With our modern passion for 
efficiency, and with efficiency rapidly becoming 
compulsory everywhere, that colourful class of 
ancient lineage, the bums, is quickly becoming 
persona non grata to our civilisation, and will 
soon be extinct. To the next generation, in all 
probability, the word bum will be but an empty 
name. I doubt whether it would be a feasible 
plan for Dr. Hornaday to undertake to preserve 
a small number of this species in the Bronx Park. 
The bum nature, I fear, would languish in cap- 
tivity. The creature would likely lose its health, 
and, worse, its spirits. It is a nomad, a child 
of nature. It takes no thought for the morrow, 
as our modern prophets teach us to do. I re- 
member well an excellent bum (I mean excel- 
lently conforming to type) , one Bain, who, grow- 

[75] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ing restive under restraint, lost a position which 
he happened to have. I asked him what he was 
going to do now. There was something sublime 
about that being. He had faith that the Lord 
would provide. His simple reply was: "Well, 
the ravens fed Elijah." 

Stuffed bums in the American Museum of 
Natural History would not be any good. Any 
good, that is, as objects of study. Our children 
will require to know, to see the past steadily and 
see it whole, the habits of bums, their manners 
and customs. So, as I say, my work would be 
invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in Eng- 
land) has, of course, been celebrated in the litera- 
ture of the past from time immemorial. I can't 
at the moment put my finger on any, but I have 
no doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer. 
That Persian philosopher who found paradise 
enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse be- 
neath a bough, FalstafF, Richard Swiveller, how 
they flock to the mind, they of the care-free kid- 
ney I They are in the Books of the great He- 
brew literature. There was he that took his 
journey into a far country. "Gil Bias" and all 
the early picaresque novels on into the pages 
of "The Romany Rye" swarm wdth them. But 
[76] 



A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

what is wanting, what will be needed, is a richly 
informed picture of the last of the race, those 
now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast pass- 
ing away. There is only one way in which such 
a book could be, or should be written. 

"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and 
Courteous Author who introduced the ingenious 
way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord 
Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his 
^'Miscellaneous Reflections." Peace be with the 
souls of all those who, for the delight of the 
anointed, have practised that most debonair of 
all the arts, the ingenious way of miscellaneous 
writing! Now, as highly successful novelists 
always say nowadays when interviewed for 
highly successful newspapers, "I know very lit- 
tle about literature," but I fancy this benign way 
of writing had its well-spring in those prepos- 
terous days, now long fled, when men of reading 
were content to give their best thoughts first to 
their friends and then — ten years or so after- 
wards — to the "publick." Its period was the 
day of the "wits" — those beaux of the mind. 

I guess the reason it has gone by the board is 
that it was what would be called "literary." And 
there is nothing we are so scared of to-day as 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

the literary. It was not those dons the critics, 
we are told on the subway cards, who made Dick- 
ens immortal — it was YOU. And our foremost 
magazines advertise the "un-literary essay." 
"Literary expression," that Addisonian English 
stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the lack 
of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts. What 
we want is writers who have something to say, 
and w^ho say it naturally and without any beat- 
ing about the bush. 

While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for 
those who savour it, is the author's joyous inabil- 
ity, it would seem, to get any "forrader," to stick 
to the point, to carry anything with a rush. See 
the greatest miscellaneous writer who ever lived, 
as an admirable later miscellaneous writer the 
late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine Bir- 
rell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne. See 
positively the most buoyant book in all the world; 
I mean, of course, "The Path to Rome," by Hi- 
laire Belloc. That glorious newspaper article, 
"Is Genius Conscious of Its Power?" starts off, 
indeed, with an allusion to the subject of genius. 
But the genhis of this -vvTiter, of such unsur- 
passed and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to 
its true business of getting lost in the woods, and 
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A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

we take it from William Hazlitt that all in power 
are a lot of crooks. 

So one born under the miscellaneous writer's 
star who purposed to write on, say, bums he had 
known would quite likely begin with a disquisi- 
tion upon the importance of a good shape of 
human ear, and very naturally would conclude, 
with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight 
trowsers. And he would, of course, wander by 
the way into pleasant reminiscences of his child- 
hood — ^how, for instance, the child gets his idea 
of what a native is from the cuts in his geography 
book. I well remember the first time I was al- 
luded to in my presence as a native. I was very 
indignant. I knew what natives looked like from 
the cuts I had pored over. They were a fine, 
spirited race, very picturesquely attired, mostly 
in bows and arrows, and as creatures of romance 
I admired them greatly. Persons such as I and 
my parents were generally depicted in this con- 
nection as fleeing from them. And it did strike 
me as an ignoramus kind of thing that I should 
be called a native. When I was reasoned with 
to the effect that I was a native of Indiana, my 
resentment but grew. There were no natives in 
Indiana. 

[79] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

Speaking of efficiency reminds me of the real 
estate business. I have recently come somewhat 
into contact with this business and I have ob- 
served certain outstanding facts about it which 
I have not seen commented upon before. To 
set up in the real estate business one thing above 
all else is necessary, that is uncommon familiarity 
M'ith the word "imagination." If you are think- 
ing of buying a lot you will meet a tall, fair man, 
or a short, dark man (as the case may be) , but in 
any case as unimaginative-looking a man as you 
could readily imagine. From this person you will 
learn that the thing at the bottom of every great 
fortune was imagination. If the location of the 
lot which you view strikes you as rather a desolate 
and barren-looking part of the world the trouble 
is not with the location but with you. Fortj'-- 
second Street looked worse than that at one time. 
Thus, I imagine, if you have sufficient imagina- 
tion you buy the lot. 

It is a remarkable thing that the most star- 
tling spectacle in New York has never struck 
any one but myself. Forty-second Street puts 
me in mind of this. If you were a native of the 
Sandwich Islands and had never before been in 
town and were standing at the South-East cor- 
[80] 



A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

ner of Broadway and Fulton Street at nine 
o'clock in the morning and were facing West, 
you would cry out aghast at this sight: You 
would see the quiet, old world grave-yard of St. 
Paul's Chapel, the funereal stone urn upon its 
stone post marking the corner and the leaning 
headstones beyond. There is no trumpet sound. 
But from a mouth at the grave-yard's side the 
earth belches forth a host which springs quick 
into the new day. It is a remarkable spectacle 
to contemplate, fought with portent and symbol, 
though the mouth is a subway kiosk, my Sand- 
wich friend. 

Now, there are men who walk about London 
just as some men collect books. They are ama- 
teurs of London. Year by year they add pre- 
cious souvenirs to their rich collections, the find 
of an old passage way here, there the view when 
the light is quite right from one precise spot, say, 
on Waterloo Bridge. Sometimes, indeed, they 
write books about their hobby, more or less use- 
ful to the neophyte : as "A Wayfarer's London," 
or "A Wanderer in London," or "Ghosts of 
Piccadilly," or some such thing; but more fre- 
quently they are of the highest type of amateur, 
the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy in 

[81] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

his treasures with a cultivated friend but has 
nothing of his love to sell. I doubt whether there 
are any such amateurs of New York, any who 
for thirty years and more have walked our streets 
as an intellectual sport with unabated zest. Lon- 
don, of course, has the drop on us in the matter 
of richness of material for this sort of collector, 
but there is plenty to bag at home. Not far from 
the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, I 
recollect, is a queer place called Vandewater 
Street. 

Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to 
melodramas, real melodramas. There are aesthet- 
ic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I hear. 
There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I 
mean, and the enjoyment of them was untainted 
by the malady of thought. Come along now. 
We'll dive through Park Row and turn here 
down Frankfort Street. Few do turn down 
Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points 
are unappreciated. For one thing, it goes down, 
down, down a very steep incline; which is a 
spirited thing for a street to do, I think. And 
it is very narrow, at the begimiing, with side- 
walks that hug the walls, and is always in shadow, 
so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look. Horses 
[82] 



A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

climbing it always come with a plunge and a 
grinding of sparks. And the roar from the cob- 
ble stones is deafening, very stimulating to the 
imagination. The atmosphere is one of type- 
founders, leather, hides, and oyster houses. 

Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where 
there is a portculHs in New York just like the 
one at a gateway in The Tower. But if you 
snook around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge 
you'll find one, with a winding stair disappearing 
beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a dun- 
geon. Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to 
see than newsboys. There is a newsgirl who 
minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and 
Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 
'Arriet. She always wears an enormous hat. A 
fine thing for a 'Arriet to do, I think. Some- 
times the stand is minded by her mother. ( I take 
it, it is her mother.) An old body who always 
has her head wrapped in a knitted affair. A fine 
thing for an old body to do, I think. Phil May 
would have delighted in Frankfort Street. So 
would Rembrandt. Here comes an elderly per- 
son, evidently George Luk's "My Old Pal," who 
is balancing a large bundle of sticks on her head. 
Across the way is a Whistler etching; Whistler 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler 
etching all the same. You look up a frowsy lit- 
tle courtyard, the walls of which are more grace- 
ful than plumb, and you see a horse's head stick- 
ing out into the etching. Also, across the way 
the "k" has dropped out of steak on the window 
of a chop-house. The public-houses down this 
way, many of them, are very low places. The 
thing to do in this world is to get as much inno- 
cent pleasure out of the spectacle as possible. 

Well, the streets here twist about beneath the 
Bridge, so that you do not know what's beyond 
the turning. People going and coming through 
the arches are silhouettes. Overhead it is like 
the grumbling of a thunder storm. Wagons 
going over the stones rattle tremendously, and 
they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted 
at night. The streets have fine names: there is 
Gold Street, and then Jacob Street. Frankfort 
Street widens out and becomes a generous 
thoroughfare, all in sunlight. There is a huge, 
gay hoarding to the right as you go down. On 
your left you see one of the towers of the Bridge 
rising high in the air. Directly ahead the "L" 
crosses the way! 

Now comes the point which I have been getting 
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A ROUNDABOUT PAPER 

at. You dip and turn into Vandewater Street. 
Under the Bridge at once you go, where all 
sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out 
again. The atmosphere has been becoming more 
and more charged with the character of the print- 
ing business. Now may be felt the tremour and 
heard the sound of moving presses. Printing 
houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype com- 
panies, paper makers, "publishers and jobbers of 
books," "photo engraving" establishments are all 
about. Here is a far-famed publishing house the 
sight of which takes you back with a jump to 
your boyhood, your youthful, arrant, adventur- 
ous reading. Those were the happy days when 
the flavour of Crime was like ginger i' the mouth. 
Perhaps the recollection of this affects your 
thoughts now, and makes your mind more active 
than want. 

All the people going through Vandewater 
Street appear to be compositors. Fine, strap- 
ping, romantic people, compositors, smeared with 
ink! Though there are other interests in this 
street besides printing. There is a big school- 
house with every window in it broken; grand, 
desolate look to it! There is a delightful sign 
which says: "Horse collars, up stairs." There 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

are little homes toward the end of the street — it 
is one block long — little, old, two-story, brick 
dwelling houses, in charmingly bad repair, with 
fire escapes, little stairs twisting up to the doors 
and iron railings there, and window-boxes at the 
windows. 

As you turn at Pearl Street to go back again 
something comes over you. It is melodrama that 
comes over you. The vista of this queer, 
cold, lonesome, hard little street, down by the 
great city's river front, was painted, or some- 
thing very like it was painted, on back curtains 
long ago. The great, gloomy pile of the Bridge 
rises before over all. To make it right there 
should be a scream. A female figure with hair 
streaming upward should shoot through the air 
to black waters below, where there is a decrepit 
boat with a man in a striped jersey pulling at 
the oars. 



[80] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

THERE are very young, oh absurdly young! 
reviewers; and there are elderly reviewers, 
with whiskers. There are also women reviewers. 
Absurdly young reviewers are inclined to be 
youthful in their reviews. Elderly reviewers 
usually have missed fire with their lives, or they 
wouldn't still be reviewers. The best sort of a 
reviewer is the reviewer that is just getting 
slightly bald. He is not a llippertigibbet, and 
still an intelligent man — if he is a good reviewer. 
Book reviews are in nearly all the papers. 
Proprietors of newspapers don't read these 
things: they think they are deadly stuff. Many 
authors don't: because they regard them as ill- 
natured and exceedingly stupid. Book clerks 
don't read them much: for that would be like 
working overtime. Business men infrequently 
have time for such nonsense. University pro- 
fessors are inclined to pooh-pooh them as things 

[87] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

beneath them. Still somebody must read them, 
as publishers pay for them with their advertising. 
No publishers' advertising, no book reviews, is 
the policy of nearly every newspaper; and the 
reviews are generally in proportion to the amount 
of advertising. Now publishers are sagacious 
men who generally live in comfortable circum- 
stances, and who occasionally get quite rich and 
mingle in important society. They set consider- 
able store by reviews ; they employ publicity men 
at good wages who continually supply reviewers 
with valuable information by post and telephone ; 
they are fond of quoting in large type remarks 
from reviews which please them ; and sometimes, 
at reviews they don't like, they stir up a fuss and 
have literary editors removed from office. 

Yes, reviews have much power. They are 
eagerly read by multitudes of people who wi'ite 
very indignantly to the paper to correct and re- 
buke the reviewer when, owing to fatigue, he re- 
fers to Miss INIitford as having v^^'itten "Cran- 
ford," or otherwise blunders. They are the wings 
of fame to new authors. They can increase the 
sale of a book by saying that it should not be 
in the hands of the young. They are tolerated 
by the owners of papers, who are very powerful 
[88] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

men indeed, engaged in the vast modern indus- 
try of manufacturing news for the people, and 
in constant effort to obtain control of politics. 
Reviewers are paid space rates of, in some in- 
stances, as much as eight dollars a column, with 
the head lines deducted. When there is no other 
payment they always get the book they review 
free for their libraries, or to sell cheap to the sec- 
ond-hand man. Reviewers are spoken of as "the 
critics" — by simple-minded people; when their 
printed remarks are useful for that purpose, the 
remarks are called "leading critical opinions" — 
by advertisements; and reviewers are sometimes 
invited to lunch by astute authors, and are treated 
to pleasant dishes to cheer them, and given good 
cigars to smoke. 

Occasionally somebody ups and discusses the 
nature of our literary journalism and what sort 
of a creature the reviewer is. Dr. Bliss Perry 
was at this not long ago in the Yale Review. 
Editor for a couple of decades of our foremost 
literary journal, and now a professor in one of 
our great universities. Dr. Perry certainly knows 
a good deal about various branches of the book 
business. His highly critical review of the re- 
viewing business has somewhat the character of 

[89] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

a history that a great general might write of a 
war. A man who had served in the trenches, 
however, would give a more intimate picture, 
though of course it would not be as good history. 

I will give an intimate picture of the American 
reviewer at work to-day: the absurdly young, 
the slightly bald, and the elderly with whiskers; 
and of his hard and picturesque trade. 

There was an old man who had devoted a great 
many years to a close study of engraved gems. 
He embodied the result of his elaborate re- 
searches in a learned volume. I never had a gem 
of any kind in my life; at the time of which I 
write I did not have a job. A friend of mine, 
who was a professional reviewer, and at whose 
house I was stopping, brought home one day 
this book on engraved gems, and told me he 
had got it for me to review. "But," I said, "I 
don't know anything about engraved gems, and" 
(you see I was very inexperienced) "I can write 
only about things that particularly interest me." 
"You are a devil of a journalist," was my friend's 
reply; "you'd better get to work on this right 
away. You studied art, didn't you? I told the 
editor you knew all about art. And he has to 
have the article by Thursday." 
[90] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

He instructed me in certain elementary prin- 
ciples of the art of successful rcA^ewing; such, 
for example, as getting your information out of 
the book itself; and he cautioned me against em- 
ploying too many quotation marks, as the edi- 
tor did not like that. 

My review, of a couple of columns, cut a bit 
here and there by the literary editor, appeared 
in a prominent New York paper. Speaking 
quite impartially, simply as now a trained judge 
of these things, I will say that it was a very fair 
review: it "gave the book," as the term is. I dis- 
covered that I had something of a talent for this 
work; and so it was that I entered a profession 
which I have followed, with divers vicissitudes, 
for a number of years. 

I became good friends with that literary edi- 
tor, and began to contribute regularly week by 
week to his paper. He liked my style, and al- 
ways gave me a good position in the paper. He 
liked me personally, and always put my name to 
my reviews; which was a thing against the rule 
of the paper — that being that only articles by 
celebrated persons were to be signed. 

This is a point sometimes questioned. It 
seems to me that it is a good thing for the re- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

viewer to have his work signed, particularly for 
the young reviewer, whose yet ardent spirit 
craves a place in the sun. It contributes to his 
pleasant conception of reviewing as a fine thing 
to do. It makes him more alive than the anony- 
mous thing. He meets people who brighten at 
the recollection of having read his name. I know 
a man who was a very witty reviewer (when he 
was young) ; that fellow used to get love letters 
from ladies he had never seen, just like a base- 
ball pitcher, or a tenor; there was a rich man 
who ate meals at the Century Club had him there 
to dinner, because he thought him funny; he got 
a note from a Literary Adviser asking him for 
a book manuscript; and two persons wrote him 
from San Francisco. I myself have had cour- 
teous letters thanking me from authors here and 
in England. That fellow of whom I just spoke 
undoubtedly was on the threshold of a brilliant 
career; he was full of courage and laughter, 
though very poor. Then a great man offered 
him a Position as a literary editor. His name 
ceased to be seen; I heard of him after a year, 
and it was said of him that he was dreadfully bald 
and had a long beard, I mean of course meta- 
phorically speaking. 
[92] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

Whether signed reviewers are conducive to 
honesty I am not sure. There was a man (I 
know him well) wrote a book on Alaska or some 
such place, claimed he had been there. There 
was another man, his friend, who was a reviewer. 
Now the Alaskaian said to the critic: "Why 
don't you get my book from the paper? I'll 
write the review — I know more about the book 
than anybody else, anyway; and you sign it and 
get the money." And this was done; and it was 
an excellent review; and the paper (which you 
read every day) was no wiser. 

The literary editor who signed my reviews for 
me was a youth of an independent turn of mind. 
He encouraged the expression in reviews of ex- 
actly what one thought; he liked an individual 
note in them ; he had an enthusiasm for books of 
literary quality, somewhat to the neglect of other 
branches of the publishing business ; he gathered 
about him a group of writers of a spirit kindred 
to his own; and he was rapidly moulding his de- 
partment of his paper into a thing, perhaps a 
plaything, of life and colour. 

But he lacked commercial tact. He wanted to 
make something like the English lighter literary 
journals. He offended the powers behind the 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

man higher up. I saw him last on a Wednes- 
day; he outlined his plans for the future. On 
Friday, I know he "made up" his paper. Satur- 
day I looked for him, but he had gone from that 
place. There was in it a dried man of much hard 
experience of newspapers, who reigned in that 
youth's stead. The wrath of authority grinds 
with exceeding quickness. 

This which I have written is history, as many 
excellent of mind know, and should be put into 
a book: for it reveals how close we came to hav- 
ing in this country a Literary Doings that could 
be read for pleasure. I continued to learn the 
business. 

Sometimes reviewers are poets also. I know 
fifteen. Sometimes they are Irishmen. Some- 
times both. I knew one who was one of those 
Celtic Poets. His name had all the colour of the 
late Irish literaiy movement. That is, after he 
became a man of letters ; before that it was Bill 
Somethingorother. He was an earnest per- 
son, without humour (strange for an Irislmian!) , 
eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions ; and he 
had never read anji;hing at all (outside of Co- 
lumbia University) before he was called to the 
literary profession. Later he went into politics, 
[94] 



THAT REVIEWER CUSS" 

and became something at Washington. Some 
reviewers, again, are lexicographers. I know 
about a dozen of these, ranging in age from 
twenty-seven years to seventy. When they had 
finished writing the dictionary, they joined the 
army of the unemployed, and became reviewers. 
I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been 
everything, almost, under the sun — a husband, a 
father, and a householder; he has been succes- 
sively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a 
Roman Catholic. He is an eager student of the 
universe, a prodigiously energetic journalist, a 
lively and a humorous writer, a person of marked 
talent. He will be thirty shortly. 

Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by 
veteran literary men, such as, for instance, Mr. 
Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker. Dr. Perry 
mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned 
bookmen, including Mr. Paul Elmer More and 
Professor Frank IMather, Jr. Mr. Boynton is 
another sound workman. On the other hand, by 
some papers, books are economically given out 
for review to reporters. And again (for the 
same reason), to editorial writers and to various 
editors. In America, you know, practically 
everybody connected with a newspaper is an edi- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

tor. The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves 
smoking a corncob pipe, clipping up with large 
scissors vast piles of newspapers, is exchange 
editor. There was a paper for which I worked 
from morn till dewy eve, reviewing books, where 
we used to say that we had an elevator editor 
and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she 
was. 

Reviewers of course frequently differ widely 
in their conceptions of a book. I said one time 
of a book of Lady Gregory's that it was a highly 
amusing affair; and I gave numerous excerpts 
in support of my statement. I had enjoyed the 
book greatly. It was delightful, I thought. It 
was then a bit of a jolt to me to read a lengthy 
article by another reviewer of the same book, 
who set forth that Lady Gregory was an ex- 
tremely serious person, with never a smile, and 
who gave copious evidence of this point in quota- 
tions. Each of us made out a perfectly good 
case. 

Now suppose you read in the New York This, 
a daily paper, that Such-and-Such a book was 
the best thing of its kind since Adam. And sup- 
pose you found the same opinion to be that of the 
New York Weekly That and of the New York 
[96] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

Weekly Other. Notwithstanding that the New 
York Something-Else declared that this was the 
rottenest book that ever came from the press, 
you would be inclined to accept the conclusion 
of the majority of critics, would you not? Well, 
I'll tell you this : the man who "does" the fiction 
week by week for the New York This and for 
The That and for The Other, is one and the same 
industrious person. I know him well. He has 
a large family to support (which is continually 
out of shoes) and his wife just presented him 
with a new set of twins the other day. He is now 
trying to add the job on The Something -Else to 
his list. 

Let us farther suppose that you are a maga- 
zine editor. You wrote this Such-and-Such book 
yourself. You are a very disagreeable person 
(we will imagine). You rejected three of my 
stories about my experiences as a vagabond. 
Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you 
about this over the telephone, you told me that 
you were very busy. When your book came out 
I happened to review it for three papers. I tried 
to do it justice although I didn't think much of 
the book, or of anything else that you ever did. i 

Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of hu- 

[97] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

man nature, and considering the power of the 
reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think 
there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews. 
The prejudice is the other way round, in "log 
rolling," as it is called, among little cliques of 
friends. Though I have known more than one 
case more or less like that of a reviewer man, 
otherwise fairly well balanced, who had a rabid 
antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis. When- 
ever he got hold of a book of Havelock Ellis's 
he became blind and livid with rage. 

In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, 
I used to review generally only books that I was 
particularly interested in, books on subjects with 
which I was familiar, books by authors whom I 
knew all about. And in writing my reviews I 
used to wait now and then for an idea. Those 
were happy, innocent, amateur days. That is: 
when my thoughts got stalled I would throw my- 
self on a couch for a bit, or I would look out at 
my window, or I took a turn about Gramercy 
Park for a breath of air. Reviews sometimes 
had to be in by the following day, or, so my edi* 
tor would declare to me with much vigour over the 
telephone, the paper would go to smash ; and then 
he would hold them in type for three weeks. But 
[98] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

they rarely had to be done within a couple of 
hours or less. 

In the course of time I got down to brass tacks ; 
I took a staff position, a desk job. It was up to 
me to review everything going, in a steady cease- 
less grind. I began work at half past nine in 
the morning. When I was commuting I began 
earlier, taking up a book on the train. Between 
nine thirty and a quarter to eleven I did a book, 
say, on the extermination of the house-fly; from 
then until lunch time, three hundred words on a 
very pleasant novel called, for instance, "Roast 
Beef, Medium" ; in the afternoon, three-quarters 
of a column on a "History of the American Ne- 
gro"; winding up the day, perhaps, with a lively 
article about a popular book on "Submarine Div- 
ing and Light Houses" ; and taking home at night 
the "Note Books of Samuel Butler." I began the 
morrow, very likely, with an "omnibus article" 
Imnping together five books on the Panama 
Canal. And then, as the publishers of the latest 
book on art had turned in a double-column hun- 
dred-agate-line "ad" the week before, it was nec- 
essary to do something serious "for" that mas- 
terpiece. I reviewed a dictionary and a couple 
of cookery books. At the holiday season I pol- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ished off a jumble of Christmas and New Year's 
cards, a pile of picture calendars, and a table full 
of "juveniles." Woman suffrage, alcoholism, 
New Thought, socialism, minor poetry, big game 
hunting, militarism, athletics, architecture, 
eugenics, industry, European travel, education, 
eroticism, red blood fiction, himiour, uplift books, 
white slavery, nature study, aviation, bygone 
kings (and their mistresses) , statesmen, scientists, 
poverty, disease, and crime, I had always with 
me. I became a slightly bald reviewer. 

Books of theology and of philosophy were 
given out to a theologian; books concerning the 
dramatic art were done by the dramatic critic; 
and those on music went to the music critic. We 
had an occasional letter from Paris on current 
French literature. 

In addition to ^^Titing (for I was an editor), I 
read the "literary" galley proofs; "made up" once 
a week down in the composing room late at night ; 
compiled the feature variously called in different 
papers Books Received, Books of the Week, or 
The Newest Books; and got out the correspond- 
ence of the literary department — with publishers 
and with fools who write in about things. I also 
went over the foreign exchange, that is: clipped 
[100] 



i 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

literary notes out of foreign papers. Once a 
month I surveyed the current magazines. I 
worked in the office on every holiday of the year 
except Christmas and New Year's, and fre- 
quently on Sundays at home. 

With a view to attracting the intellectual elite 
to a profession where this class is needed, I will 
tell you what I got for this. It should be under- 
stood, however, that I was with one of the great 
papers, which paid a scale of generous salaries. 
Mine was forty dollars a week. That is a good 
deal of money for a literary man to earn regu- 
larly. But — 

I did, indeed, have an assistant in this office; 
there was a person associated v/ith me who took 
the responsibility of everything in the depart- 
ment that was excellent. That is, I was "assist- 
ant literary editor." Few newspapers can afford 
to employ a chief solely for each department. It 
is recognised that the work of the literary editor 
can be economically combined with that of the 
dramatic editor, or with that of the art critic; 
or the art critic runs the Saturday supplement, 
or some such thing. My chief looked in every 
day or so, and frequently, perhaps in striving for 
exact honesty I should say regularly, contributed 

[101] 



WxVLKING-STICK PAPERS 

reviews. He directed the policy of the depart- 
ment, subject, of course, to criticism from "down 
stairs." 

But (as I was about to say above) that regu- 
lar income is very uncertain. Universities culti- 
vate a sense of security in their professors, in or- 
der to obtain loyal service and lofty endeavour. 
The editorial tenure, as all men know, is a house 
of sand — a sunmier's breeze, a wash of the tide, 
and the editor is a refugee. I know the editor 
of literary pages that go far and wide, who has 
held down that job now for over a year. That 
man is troubled : none has ever stood in his shoes 
for much longer than that. 

"Don't fool yourself," I heard a successful 
young journalist say the other day to a very con- 
scientious young reviewer. "Good w'ork won't 
get you anything. Play politics, office politics 
all the while." Doubtless sound advice, this, for 
any gainful employment. 

Now about that prime department of the press 
called the business office. Many people firmlj^ 
believe that all book reviews — and dramatic criti- 
cisms and editorials — are bought by "the inter- 
ests." One of the principal librarians of New- 
York holds this view of reviews. I never knew 
[102] 



THAT REVIEWER 'CUSS" 

a reviewer who was bound to tell anything but 
the truth as he saw it. Nor have I ever written 
in any review a word that I knew to be false; 
and I believe that few reviewers do. Because, 
however, this or that publishing house was "a 
friend of ours," or because the husband of this 
author used to work for the paper (pure senti- 
ment!), or that one is a friend of the wife of The 
Editor (caution!), it has been suggested to me 
by my chief that I "go easy" with certain books. 

The good reviewer does go easy with most 
books. It is a mark of his excellence as a re- 
viewer that he has a catholic taste, that he sees 
that books are written to many standards, and 
that every book, almost, is meet for some. It is 
not his business to break things on the wheel ; but 
to introduce the book before him to its proper 
audience; always recognising, of course, some- 
times with pleasant subtle irony, its limitations. 
It is only when a book pretends to be what it is 
not, that he damns it. All that is not business, 
but sensible, sensitive criticism. 

To return. The business office exerts not a 
direct but a moral influence, so to put it, upon 
the literary department. Business tact must be 
recognised. A hostile review already in type and 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

in the plan of the next issue may be "killed" 
when a large "ad" announcing books brought 
out by the publisher of this one so treated comes 
in for the next paper; and then search is made 
for a book from the same publisher which may 
be favourably reviewed. Or a hostile review may 
be held over until a time more politic for its re- 
lease, say following several enthusiastic reviews. 
And there is no sense in noticing in one issue a 
disproportionate number of books published by 
one house. 

In concluding my discussion I will draw two 
portraits of professional reviewers, one composite 
of a class, the other a picture of a man who stands 
at the top of his profession. 

Seated at his desk is a little man with a pointed 
beard and a large bald spot on top of his head. 
This man has been all his life a literary hack. 
He has read manuscript for publishing houses; 
he has novelised popular plays for ha-penny pa- 
pers, and dramatised trashy novels for cheap pro- 
ducers; he has done routine chore writing in 
magazine offices, made translations for pirate 
publishers, and picked up an odd sum now and 
then by a "Sunday story." He has always been 
an anonymous writer. He has never had suffi- 
[104] 



THAT REVIEWER "CUSS" 

cient intellectual character to do anything well. 
The downward side of middle age finds him af- 
flicted with various physical ailments, entirely 
dependent upon a precarious position at a moder- 
ate salary, without influential friends, completely 
disillusioned, with a mediocre mind now much 
fagged, devoid of high ambition, and with a most 
unstimulating prospect before him. His attitude 
toward the business of book reviewing is that he 
wishes he had gone into the tailor business or 
that his father had left him a grocery store. He 
would not have succeeded, however, as either a 
tailor or a grocer, as he has even less business than 
literary ability. Farther, he regards himself as 
a gentleman, and books strike him as being more 
gentlemanly than trade. He has got along as 
well as he has, by blufl* about his extensive ac- 
quaintance with literature, and his long experi- 
ence in writing and publishing. 

This type of reviewing man says that he does 
the thing "mechanically." About the new crop 
of juvenile books, let us say, he says the same 
thing again now that he said four years ago. 
"One idea every other paragraph," is his princi- 
ple, and he thinks it sufficient in a review. Suffi- 
cient, that is, to "get by." And whatever gets 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

by, in his view, "pleases them just as well as any- 
thing else." Our friend of this character has a 
considerable niunber of stock remarks which may 
at any time be written very rapidly. One of these 
sentences is : "This book furnishes capital read- 
ing;" another says that this book "is welcome;" 
and he holds as a general principle that, "the re- 
viewer who reads the book is lost." 

Occasionally, very occasionally, there is found 
among reviewers the type of old-fashioned per- 
son who used to be called a "man of letters." 
This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand 
thing for American reviewing if every one of our 
young reviewers could have for an hour each 
week the moral benefit of the society of such a 
man. I know one who now has been active in 
New York literary journalism for something like 
thirty years — a fine intellectual figure of a man. 
He makes his living out of this, indeed, but his in- 
terest is in the thing itself, in hterature. He has 
all that one really needs in the world, he has the 
esteem of the most estimable people, and he fol- 
lows with unceasing pleasure a delightful occu- 
pation. He is as keen to-day, he declares, on the 
"right way of putting three words together" as 
he was when he began to write. His mellow, 
[106] 



THAT HEVIEWER "CUSS" 

witty, and gentlemanly style is saturated with 
the sounds, scents and colours of literature. The 
exercise of his cultivated judgment is not a trade, 
but a sacred trust. To look at him and to think 
of his admirable career is to realise the dignity 
of his calling — discussing with authority the 
books of the world as they come from the press. 



[107] 



VI 

LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON* 

NOW it's a funny thing, that, come to think 
of it. Some folks have questioned whether, 
the other way round, it could be done in this 
country at all. It's a pleasant view anyhow that 
the matter presents of that curious affair the 
English character. 

There is a notion knocking about over here 
that considerable rigmarole is required to meet 
an Englislmian. And very probably few who 
have tried it would dispute that it is somewhat 
difficult to "meet" an ordinary Englishman to 
whom you are not known in a railway carriage. 
With the big 'uns, hoAvever, the business appears 
to be simple enough. Foolish doings do clutter 
up one's luggage with letters of introduction 
when all that is needed to board round with the 
most celebrated people in England is a glance 
at a "Who's Who" in a pubhc library to get ad- 
dresses. 
[108] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

For the purpose of convenience the writer of 
these souvenirs will refer to himself as "I" and 
"me." I was all done up in health and was ad- 
yised by doctors to clear out at once. So I bought 
a steamship ticket, packed a kit bag, crossed the 
water and took a couple of strolls about that is- 
land over there ; when, feeling fitter, I turned up 
in London for a look about. 

It sort of came over me that in my haste of 
departure I had neglected to bring any of my 
friends along, or to equip myself with the means 
of making others here. I was unarmed, so to say 
— a "Yank" in an obviously hostile country. This, 
you see, was before the war, before we and Britain 
had got so genuinely sweet on one another. 

At that time I had two acquaintances resident 
in London. One, a Bostonian, whose attention 
was quite occupied with a new addition to his 
family; the other was the errand man stationed 
before my place of abode. He was an amiable 
soul, whose companionable nature, worldly wis- 
dom and topographical knowledge I much appre- 
ciated. He instructed me in the culinary subject 
of "bubble and squeak" and many other learned 
matters ; but unfortunately his social connections 
were hmited to one class. 

[109] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

One tinie not a great while back I happened 
to review in succession for a New York paper 
several books by Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Belloc had 
written me a note thanking me for these reviews. 
I decided to write Mr. Belloc that I was in Lon- 
don and to ask if he could spare a moment for me 
to look at him, Mr. Belloc being one of my liter- 
ary passions. 

Then an ambitious idea popped into my head. 
I determined to write the same request to all the 
people in England I had ever reviewed. Review- 
ing, mostly anonymous, had been my business for 
several years, with other literary chores on the 
side. I communicated to Mr. Chesterton the fact 
that I had come over to look about, told him 
my belief that he was one of the noblest and most 
interesting monuments in England, and asked 
him if he supposed that he could be "viewed" by 
me, at some street corner, say, at a time ap- 
pointed, as he rumbled past in his triumphal car. 

Writing to famous people that you don't know 
is somewhat like the drink habit. It is easy to 
begin; it is pleasurably stimulating; it soon fas- 
tens itself upon you to the extent that it is ex- 
ceedingly difficult to stop indulgence and it leads 
you straight to excess. I wound up, I think, 
[110] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

with Hugh Walpole. I had liked that "Forti- 
tude" thing very much. 

My Englishised Boston friend — he's the worst 
Englishman I saw over there — simply threw up 
his hands. He groaned and fell into a chair. 

"Holy cat !" he cried, or English words to that 
eifect, "you can't come over here and do that 
way. It's not done," he declared. "You can't 
meet Englishmen in that fashion. These people 
will think you are a wild, bounding red Indian. 
They'll all go out of town until you leave the 
country." 

Well, I saw it was awfully bad. I have dis- 
graced the U. S. A. That's what comes of hav- 
ing crude notions about meeting people. I felt 
pretty cheap. I felt sorry for my friend too, 
because he had to stay there where he lived and 
try to hold his head up while I could slink off 
back home. My friend pointed out to me that 
Mr. Chesterton and the other gentlemen had only 
my word for it that I had any connection with 
literature, and that as far as they were aware 
I might be the worst kind of crook, and at the 
very best was in all likelihood a very great bore. 

Annie, the maid at my lodgings, handed me 
a bunch of mail. Mr. Belloc was particularly 

[111] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

eager to see me, he said. He gave me an intimate 
two page account of his movements for the past 
couple of weeks or so. He had just been out to 
sea in his boat, the Nona, and had only got back 
after a good deal of difficulty outside; this he 
hoped would account for the delay of a day or so 
in his reply. 

During the Whitsun days he had to travel 
about England to see his childi-en at their vari- 
ous schools, and after that he had to go to set- 
tle again about his boat, where she lay in a Welsh 
port. Then he must speak at Eton. He would 
be "available," however, at the beginning of the 
next w^eek, when he hoped I would "take a meal" 
with him. Perhaps he could be of some use in ac- 
quainting me with England; it would be such a 
pleasure to meet me, and so on. Very nice atti- 
tude for a man so slightly acquainted with one. 

Mr, Chesterton wished to thank me for my let- 
ter and to say that he would be pleased if I cared 
to come down to spend an afternoon with him at 
Beaconsfield. ]Mr. Walpole apologised very 
greatly for seeming so curtly inhospitable, but he 
was only in London for a short time and had diffi- 
culty in squeezing his engagements in. This 
week, too, was infernally complicated by Ascot. 
[112] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

But couldn't I come round on Monday to lunch 
with him at his club? 

Mr. Chesterton is a grand man. Smokes ex- 
cellent cigars. But first, as you come up the hill 
from the railway station toward the old part of 
the village and to the little house Overroads, you 
enter, as like as not, as I did, a gate set in a pleas- 
ant hedge, and you knock at a side door, to the 
mirth later of Mrs. Chesterton. 

This agreeable entrance is that for tradesmen. 
The way you should have gone in is round some- 
where on another road. A maid admits you to a 
small parlour and in a moment Mrs. Chesterton 
comes in to inquire if you have an appointment 
with her husband. She always speaks of Mr. 
Chesterton as "my husband." It develops that 
the letter you sent fixing the appointment got 
balled up in some way. It further develops that 
a good many things connected with Mr. Chester- 
ton's life and house get balled up. Mrs. Chester- 
ton's line seems to be to keep things about a 
chaotic husband as straight as possible. 

Mr. Chesterton is a very fat man. His por- 
traits, I think, hardly do him sufficient honour in 
this respect. He has a remarkably red face. And 
a smalhsh moustache, lightish in colour against 

[113] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

this background. His expression is extraordi- 
narily innocent ; he looks like a monstrous infant. 
A tumbled mane tops him off. He sits in his 
parlour in a very small chair. 

Did I write him when I was coming? Wonder 
what became of the letter? Doesn't remember it. 
Perhaps it is in his dressing gown. Has a habit 
of sticking things that interest him into the pocket 
of his dressing gown. Where, do you suppose, 
is his dressing gown? However, no matter. 
"Have a cigar. Do have a cigar. Wonder where 
my cigars are! Where are my cigars?" Mrs. 
Chesterton locates them. 

Now about that poem, "The Inn at the End 
of the World," or some such thing. He is in- 
clined to think that he did write it, but he cannot 
remember where it was published. Now he has 
lost his glasses, ridiculously small glasses, which 
he has been continually attempting to fix firmly 
upon his nose. Slapping yourself about the 
chest is an excellent way to find glasses. 

Well, it is very flattering to be told that one is 
so well known in America. But so he had heard 
before. Describes himself as a "philosophical 
journalist." Did not know that there was an 
audience in America for his kind of writing. 
[114] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

Wonders whether democracy as carried on there 
"on such a gigantic scale" can keep right on suc- 
cessfully. Admits a division between our two 
peoples. "Trenches have been dug between us," 
he declares. 

Rises to a remark about the Englishman's ever- 
lasting garden. "He likes to have a little fringe 
about him," he says. And then tells a little 
story, which one might say contains all the ele- 
ments of his art. 

When he first came to Beaconsfield, Mr. Ches- 
terton said, the policemen used to touch their hel- 
mets to him, until he told them to stop it. Be- 
cause, he said, he felt that rather he should touch 
his hat to the policemen. "Saluting the colours, 
as it were," he explained. "For," he added, "are 
they not officers of the King?" 

Mr. Chesterton apologised for being, as he put 
it, excessively talkative. This was occasioned, 
he said, by "worry and fatigue." I declined to 
stay for tea, as I noticed a chugging car awaiting 
in front of the house. "You must come to see 
me again," said the grand young man of Eng- 
land. The last I saw of him he was rolling 
through his garden, tossing his mane; the famous 

[115] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

garden that rose up and hit him, you remember, 
at the time of his unfortunate fall. 

Fine time I had with young Walpole. Those 
English certainly have the drop on us in the 
matter of clubs. They live about in the haunts 
beloved of Thackeray, and everybody else you 
ever heard of. Pleasant place, the Garrick. 
Something like our Players, but better. Slick 
collection of old portraits. Fine bust there of 
Will Shakespeare, found bottled up in some old 
passage. 

Fashionable young man, Walpole. I can't 
remember exactly whether or not he had on all 
these things ; but he's the sort that, if he had on 
nothing, would look as if he had: silk topper, 
spats, buttonhole bouquet. Asked me if I had 
yet been to Ascot. "Oh, you must go to Ascot." 
Buys his cigarettes, in that English way, in bulk, 
not by the box. "Stuff some in your pocket," 
he said. "Won't you have a whiskey and soda?" 

Difficult person to talk with, as the only Eng- 
lish he knows is the King's English. I was en- 
deavouring to explain that I had left New York 
rather suddenly. "I just beat it, you know," I 
said. 

"You beat it?" said Mr. Walpole. 
[116] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

"Yes, I just up and skidooed." 

"You skidooed?" 

I saw that I should have to talk like John Mil- 
ton. "Sure," I said, "I left without much prep- 
aration." And then we spoke of some writer I 
do not care for. "I don't get him," I said. 

"You don't get him?" inquired Mr. Walpole. 

"No," I said, "I can't see him at all." 

"You can't see him?" queried Mr. Walpole. 

More Milton, I perceived. "I quite fail," I 
said, "to appreciate the gentleman's writings." 
Mr. Walpole got that. 

"Fortitude" had done him very well. The idea 
of Russia had always fascinated him; he had 
enough money to run him for a couple of years, 
and he was leaving shortly for Russia. "Is there 
any one here you would like me to help you to 
see?" he asked. Queer way for a gentleman to 
treat a probable crook. "Have you met Mr. 
James?" Walpole was very strong with Mr. 
James, it seemed. 

Read aloud a letter just received from Mr. 
James, which he had been fingering, to show that 
his informal, epistolary style was identical with 
that of his recent autobiographical writings, 
which we had been discussing. "Bennett, of 

[117] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

course you should see Arnold Bennett." Great 
friend of Walpole's. "And Mrs. Belloc Lown- 
des," said Mr. Walpole, "you really must know 
her; knows as much about the writing game as 
any one in England. I'll write those three let- 
ters to-night." 

Suddenly he asked me if I were married. "All 
Americans are," was his comment. He had to 
be going. Some stupid affair, he said, for the 
evening. We walked together around into the 
Strand. "Well, good-bye," said Mr. Walpole, 
extending his hand, "I've got to beat it now." 

There was an awesome sort of place where 
Thackeray went, you remember, where he was 
scared of the waiters. This probably was not 
the Reform Club, as he was very much at home 
there and loved the place. However, just the 
outside of this "mausoleum" in Pall Mall scared 
Mr. Hopkinson Smith, who had been inside a few 
clubs here and there, and who spoke, in a sketch 
of London, of its "forbidding" aspect, "a great, 
square, sullen mass of granite, frowning at you 
from under its heavy browed windows — an aloof, 
stately, cold and unwelcome sort of place." 

An aristocratic functionary, probably a super- 
annuated member of Parliament, placed me 
[118] 



LITERARY LEVITIES IN LONDON 

under arrest at the door, and in a vast, marble 
pillared hall I was held on suspicion to await the 
arrival of Mr. Belloc. 

A large, brawny man he is, with massive shoul- 
ders, a prizefighter's head, a fine, clean shaven 
face and a bull neck. Somehow he suggested to 
me — though I do not clearly remember the pic- 
ture — the portrait of William Blake by Thomas 
Phillips, R. A., in the National Portrait Gal- 
lery, frequently reproduced in books. 

He gives your hand a hearty wrench, turns and 
strides ahead of you into another room. You — 
and small boys in buttons, with cards and letters 
on platters, to whom he pays no attention — trot 
after him. A driving, forceful, dominating char- 
acter, apparently. Looks at his watch fre- 
quently. Perpetually up and down from town, 
he says, and continually rushing about London. 
Keen on the job, evidently, all the while. 

He does not know how far you are acquainted 
with England; "there is a wonderful lot of things 
to be seen in the island." Tells you all sorts of 
unusual places to go; how, somewhere in the 
north, you can walk along a Roman wall for ever 
so long, "a wonderful experience." Makes your 

[119] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

head spin, he knows so much that you never 
thought of about England. 

Discussing a tremendous meeting later on, 
where all the literary nobility of London are to 
be with you, he follows you down the steps when 
you go. Later forgets, in the crush of his affairs, 
all about this arrangement. Then sends you tele- 
grams and basketfuls of letters of apology, with 
further invitations. 

"Here you are, sir! All the winners! One 
penny." This had been the cry of the news lads 
but the week before. 

"England to fight! Here you are, sir. Brit- 
ain at war!" suddenly they began to yell through 
the streets. 

It was not an hour now, I felt, to trouble Eng- 
lishmen with my petty literary adventures. Also, 
I became a refugee, to some extent. And, well 
— I "beat it" back 'ome again. This was the only 
way I knew, as a neutral (then), to serve the 
countries at war. 



[120] 



VII 

HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF 

WE have now to record an extraordinary 
adventure. Our later education was de- 
rived in some considerable measure from the writ- 
ings of Mr. Henry James. This to explain our 
emotion. We had never expected to behold him- 
self, the illustrious expatriate who had so far en- 
lightened an unkempt mind. But the night be- 
fore we had been talking of him. Indeed, it is 
impossible for us to fail to perceive here some- 
thing of the supernatural. 

But hold! "William Edwards," says a news- 
paper notice, "who used to drive a post stage be- 
tween New York and Albany, died on Saturday 
at his home. He was born in Albany," and so 
and so, "and many were the stories he had to tell 
of incidents connected with the famous men who 
were his passengers." Even so. We were our- 
selves a clerk. That is, for a number of years we 

[121] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

waited on customers in a celebrated book shop. 
This is one of the stories we have to tell of the 
personages who were, so to say, our passengers. 
Or perhaps we are more in the nature of those 
unscrupulous English footmen to high society, 
of whom we have heard, who "sell out" their ob- 
servation and information to the society press. 

Anyhow, we are of a loquacious, gossipy turn; 
and we were booksellers, so to speak, to crowned 
heads. We have recently heard, too, of another 
precedent to our garrulous performance, the pub- 
lication in Rome of the memoirs of an old waiter, 
who carefully set down the relative liberality of 
prominent persons whom he served. After hav- 
ing served Cardinals RampoUa and Merry del 
Val, this excellent memoirist entered opposite 
their names, "Both no good." With this we drop 
the defensive. 

We noticed Mr. Wharton sitting down, legs 
crossed, smoking a cigar. Awaiting, we pre- 
sumed, his wife. A not unpicturesque figure, 
tall, rather dashing in effect, ruddy visage, dra- 
goon moustache, and habited in a light, smartly 
cut sack suit of rather arresting checks, conspicu- 
ous. grey spats; a gentleman manifesting no in- 
terest whatever in his surroundings. 
[122] 



HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF 

Mr. Brownell, the critic, entered through the 
front door and moved to the elevator. 

There stepped from the elevator car a some- 
what portly little man who joined Mr. Wharton. 
He wore a rather queer looking, very big derby 
hat, oddly flat on top. His shoulders were 
hooped up somewhat like the figure of Joseph 
Choate. A rather funny, square, box-like body 
on little legs. An English look to his clothes. 
Under his arm an odd-looking club of a walking- 
stick. Mr. Brownell turned quickly to this rather 
amusing though not undistinguished figure, and 
said, "Mr. James — Brownell." The quaint 
gentleman took off his big hat, discovering to 
our intent curiosity a polished bald dome, and 
began instantly to talk, very earnestly, steadily, 
in a moderately pitched voice, gesticulating with 
an even rhythmic beat with his right hand, raised 
close to his face. 

Joined presently by Mrs. Wharton, the party, 
bidding Mr. Brownell adieu, took a somewhat 
humorous departure (we felt) from the shop; 
JMr. James, with some suddenness, preceding out 
the door. Moving nimbly up the Avenue, he 
was overhauled by Mrs. Wharton under full sail, 
who attached herself to his arm. Her husband 

[123] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

by an energetic forward play around the end 
achieved her other wing. In this formation, 
sticks flashing, skirt whipping, with a somewhat 
spirited mien, the august spectacle receded from 
our rapt view, to be at length obliterated as a 
unit by the general human scene. 

We saw Mr. James after this a number of 
times. Accompanied again by Mrs. Wharton, 
and later in the charge (such was the effect) of 
another lady, who, we understood, drives regu- 
larly to her social chariot literary lions. In 
something like six years' observation of the hu- 
man being in a book shop, we have never seen any 
person so thoroughly in a book store, a maga- 
zine, that is, of books, as Mr. James. One can 
be, you know — it is most common, indeed — in a 
book store and at the same time not be in a book 
store — any more than if one were in a hotel lobby. 
Mr. James "snooked" around the shop. He ran 
his nose over the tables, and inch by inch (he 
must be very shortsighted) along the walls, stood 
on tiptoe and pulled down volumes from high 
places, rummaged in dark corners, was appar- 
ently oblivious of the presence of anything but 
the books. He was not the slightest in a hurry. 
He would have been, we felt, content and quite 
[124] 



HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF 

happy, like a child with blocks, to play this way 
by himself all day. 

Happening, by our close proximity, to turn to 
us the first time in the shop that he required at- 
tention, upon each succeeding visit he sought out 
us to attend to his wishes. The position of re- 
tail salesman "on the floor" is one completely 
exposed to every human attitude and humour. 
Against arrogance, against contempt of himself 
as a shop person, a species of "counter-jumper," 
against irascibility, against bigoted ignorance, 
against an indissoluble assumption, perhaps logi- 
cal, that he is of inferior mentality, this f actotimi 
has no defence. His very business is to meet all 
with amenity. It is his daily portion, included 
in the material with which he works. 

It (he finds) injures him not, essentially; it 
ceases to particularly affect him, beyond his in- 
ward appraisement of the character before him. 
Toward him one acts simply in accordance with 
the instincts of one's nature. His status counsels 
no constraint, invites no display, has no property 
of stimulation. Thus the view of a famous man's 
character from the position of retail clerk is val- 
uable. Mr. James's manner with Mr. Brownell 
would hardly be the same as toward us. But it 

[125]i 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

was, exactly. There was present in his mind at 
the moment, was quite apparent, absolutely no 
consciousness of any distance of mind, or posi- 
tion, between him and us. He sought conversa- 
tion (any suggestion of so equalising a thing as 
conversation with a clerk is not uncommonly re- 
pressed by the important as preposterous). In 
his own talk with us, he seemed to us to be a man 
consciously striving with the material of words 
and sentences to express his thought as well as 
he could. 

He was very earnest. He looked up at us 
constantly (we are a little tall) with fixed con- 
centration of gaze, and moved his hand to and fro 
as though seeking to balance his ideas. He asked 
questions with deference. Among other things, 
he desired very much to know what per cent, of 
the novels on the fiction table was the product of 
writers in England. "I live in England myself," 
he said, very simply, "and I am curious to know 
this." He expressed a little impatience at the 
measureless flood of mediocre fiction, making a 
fluttering gesture conveying a sense of impotence 
to give it attention. He barely glanced at the 
pile of his own book, and did not mention it. He 
did not seem at first (though we believe later he 
[126] 



HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF 

changed this opinion) to think highly of Arnold 
Bennett (this was at the first bloom of Mr. Ben- 
nett's vogue here), nor to have read him. *'0h, 
yes, yes; he is an English journalist," in a tone 
as though, merely a journalist. Clear artist in 
fibre. When he took his departure he bade us 
"Good day," and lifted his hat. 

Succeeding visits caused us to suspect that Mr. 
James's ideas of the machinery of business are 
somewhat naive. He seemed to regard us as, so 
to say, the whole works. It entered our head that 
maybe Mr. James thought we received and an- 
swered all manner of correspondence, editorial 
as well as that connected with the retail business, 
opened up in the morning, read, accepted, and 
rejected manuscript, nailed up boxes for ship- 
ment, swept out the shop, and were acquainted 
perfectly with all confidential matters of the 
House. *'I wrote you" (us), "you know," he 
said. And he referred by the way, apparently 
upon the assumption that the matter had been 
laid before us, to business of which we could not 
possibly have cognizance. And then he desired 
to send some books. Fumbling in his breast 
pocket, he produced a letter, from which he read 
aloud a list of his own works apparently re- 

[127] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

quested of him. Carefully replacing his letter, 
he said: "I should like to send these books to my 
sister-in-law." With that he started out. 

Now, it was not a difficult problem to assume 
that this could be no other than Mrs. WiUiam 
James, still, it is customary for purchasers to 
state the name of the person to whom goods are 
to go, and many people are sceptical that the 
salesman has it down right even then. "Your 

sister-in-law, Mr. James, is ?" we suggested. 

"Oh, yes, of course — of course; Mrs. William 
James; of course — of course," Mr. James said. 
Now, certainly, he supposed (it was evident) 
he had got finally settled a difficult and compli- 
cated piece of business. Mrs. William James's 
regular address we might reasonably infer. Still 
it might be that she was at the moment somewhere 
else, on a visit. It were better to have Mr. James 
^ive his order in the regular way. "And the ad- 
dress?" we mentioned. "Oh, yes — oh, yes; of 
course — of course," Mr. James said apologeti- 
cally. Then, pausing a moment to see if there 
was anything more in this bewildering labyrinth 
of details to such a complex transaction, he de- 
parted, taking, as he drew away, his hat, as Mrs. 
Nickleby says, "completely off." 
[128] 



HENRY JAMES, HIMSELF 

Instead of ascending directly to that regal do- 
main which is unaware of our existence, Mr. 
James, with the inclination of a bow, approached 
us one day and inquired, in a manner as though 
the decision rested largely with us, whether he 
"could see" the head of the firm. The lady who 
was his escort swept past him. "Oh, I am sure 
he will see him," she declared; "this" (with im- 
pressive awe) "is Mr. James." Had we said. No, 
right off the bat, so to say, like that, we believe 
(unchampioned) Mr. James would have gently 
withdrawn. 



[129] 



vni 

MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

I WAS born in Indiana. That was several 
years ago, and I have since seen a good deal 
of the world. I was reading in a newspaper the 
other day of a new film which shows on the screen 
the innumerable adventures of a book in the mak- 
ing, from the time the manuscript is accepted to 
the point where the completed volume is deliv- 
ered into the hands of the reader. And it struck 
me that the intimate life of a manuscript before 
it is accepted might be even more curious to the 
general public. The career of many an obscure 
manuscript, I reflected, doubtless is much more 
romantic than its character. I wonder why, I 
said, manuscripts have all been so uncommonly 
reticent concerning themselves. But manu- 
scripts, one recollects, have sensitive natures ; and 
their experiences, at least the experiences of those 
not bom to a great name, could hardly be called 
flattering to their feelings. Indeed, manuscripts 
[130] 



MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

suffer much humiliation, doubtless little suspected 
of the world. And it requires a manuscript strong 
in the spirit of detachment to lay bare its heart. 
My parent — manuscripts commonly have but 
one parent — bore me great love; indeed I think 
he loved me beyond everything else in the world. 
He was a young man apprenticed to the law, but 
he cared more for me, I think, than for his call- 
ing, which I suspect he decidedly neglected for 
my sake. I know that in his family he was held 
a rather disappointing young man; but his fam- 
ily did not know the fervour of his heart, or the 
tenacity of purpose of which he was capable. 
He toiled over my up-bringing for two years, and 
often and often into the very small hours. I 
think I was never altogether absent from his 
thoughts, even when he was abroad about his busi- 
ness or his pleasure. I was his first manuscript 
— his first, that is, that ever grew up. And though 
I know he was not ashamed but very proud of 
me, he attempted to keep my existence something 
of a secret. I could not but feel that as I de- 
veloped I was a great happiness to him, and yet 
at times he would give way to black discourage- 
ment about me. I know that I have passages 
which caused him intense pain to bring about. 

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Throughout the time of my growth my dear par- 
ent alternated between periods of high exulta- 
tion and of keen torture. As time passed he be- 
came more and more completely absorbed in me. 
When my climax came into sight he fell to work- 
ing upon me with exceeding fury, and in the 
construction of my climax it was plain that he 
wrestled with much agony — an agony, however, 
which seemed to be a kind of strange, mad joy. 
And then one night ( I remember a storm raged 
without) my parent came to me with a wild, yet 
happy, light on his face. He pounded at me 
harder than ever before; and at intervals paced 
the floor, up and down, up and down, like a man 
demented, throwing innumerable half-smoked 
cigarettes over everywhere. The wind blew, and 
the little frame house strained and groaned in its 
timbers. As he bent over me a face enwrapt, 
striking the keys with a quick, nervous touch, 
great tears started from my dear parent's eyes. 
Then, it must have been near dawn and the little 
room hung and swayed in a golden fog of tobacco 
smoke, I knew that I was finished. My parent 
was bending over my last page like a six-day bi- 
cycle racer over his machine, when he straight- 
ened up, raising his hands, and drove his right 
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MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

fist into his left palm. "Done!" he cried, and 
started from his chair to pace the room in such 
a frenzy as I had never seen him in before. It 
was fully half an hour before his excitement 
abated, when he fell back into his chair, and 
smoked incessantly until the light of morning 
paled our lamp. At length I noticed he had 
ceased to smoke, his head gradually slipped back- 
ward, his eyes closed, and he slept. Thus I was 
born and brought up and grew to manuscript's 
estate in a little Middle- Western town, on a 
rented typewriter. 

One day shortly after this I was packed up 
with great care and very carefully addressed, and 
under my parent's arm I boarded an interurban 
car. We flew over the friendly-looking Hoosier 
landscape, and at length rolled into the interur- 
ban station of the bustling capital, the largest 
city I had as yet seen. I did not see much of it, 
however, on this first visit, as we went quickly 
around the handsome Soldiers' Monument to the 
office of the American Express Company on 
Meridian Street. I was given over in charge of 
a man there who very briskly weighed me and 
asked my parent my value. My parent seemed 
to be in a good deal of a dilemma as to this. He 

[133] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

hemmed and hawed and finally replied: "Well, 
I hardly know." 

"Is its value inestimable?" inquired the clerk. 

"Why, in a way I guess you might say it is," 
said my parent. 

Finally, against the clerk's mounting impa- 
tience, an estimate was effected, and I was de- 
clared to be worth $500. I was cast carelessly 
on to a pile of other packages of various shapes 
and sizes, and my parent, giving me a farewell 
lingering look of love, went out the door. 

Of my journey there is not much to say. I 
arrived in New York amid a prodigious crush of 
packages, and was delivered, in company with 
about a dozen others, which I knew to be brother, 
or rival, manuscripts, at the office of a great pub- 
lishing house. Here I was signed for, and, in the 
course of the day, unwrapped. I was ticketed 
with a number and my title, and placed in a tall 
cabinet, where I remained in the society of sev- 
eral shelves full of other manuscripts for a num- 
ber of days. Here I was delighted to find quite 
a coterie of fellow-Hoosiers. But a remarkable 
proportion of my associates, I discovered, was 
from the South. The majority of us hailed from 
[134] 



MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

small towns. In our company were three or four 
of somewhat distinguished lineage. 

As time passed and nothing happened, I grew 
somewhat nervous, as I knew with what anxiety 
my dear parent in Indiana would be counting the 
days. One of my new-found friends, a portly 
manuscript (a story of sponge-fishers) that had 
been out of the cabinet and had had a reading 
before my arrival, told me in the way of gossip 
something of the situation at the moment in this 
house. My friend was an old campaigner, very 
ragged and battered in appearance, and had been 
(I was appalled to hear) submitted to seventeen 
publishing houses before arriving here. It had 
lost all hope of any justice in the publishing 
world, and was very cynical. Heavens! would 
I 

However, it appeared that at this house the 
first reader had just been obliged to take a va- 
cation owing to ill-health occasioned by too as- 
siduous application to her task of attempting to 
keep somewhere abreast of the incoming flood of 
manuscripts. She was, it seems, a large elderly 
lady who had tried out her own talents as a nov- 
elist without marked success some twenty years 
ago. Her niece, a miss of twenty or so, who had 

[135] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

a fancy for an editorial career and who had vainly 
been seeking a situation of this character for some 
time, found a windfall in the instant need for a 
substitute first reader. It was with some petu- 
lance, it struck me, that she yanked the door open 
one day. She was, apparently, showing some one 
about her office. "All that," she said, waving her 
hand toward my case, ''practically untouched; 
and mountains besides. I don't know how I'm 
to get away with it. I suppose I'll have to do a 
couple every night." I don't know what time it 
was, but the light was going and the young lady 
had got into bed when she began to read me, 
propped up against her knees. She yawned now 
and then and sighed repeatedly as she shifted 
back my pages. I thought I noticed that her 
knees swayed, just perceptibly, at times. Then 
suddenly my support sank to one side; I started 
to slide, and would have plunged to the floor, very 
nearly pulling her after me, if the disturbance 
had not as suddenly caught the young lady back 
into wild consciousness, and she grabbed me and 
her knees and the slipping bedclothes all in a 
lump. Shortly after this she turned back to see 
how I ended, and then went to sleep comfortably, 
lights out. 
[136] 



MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

I did not see the report the young lady wrote 
of me, but I had occasion to think that she de- 
clared I was rather stupid. However, I got an- 
other reading. I was given next to a young man, 
not, so I understood, a regular reader, but a mem- 
ber of the advertising department who was fre- 
quently called on to help weed out manuscript, 
who took me home with him and threw me onto a 
couch littered with books and papers. Here I 
stayed for ever so long. One day I heard the 
young man say to his wife, nodding toward me : 
"I ought to try to get that unfortunate thing off 
my hands before my vacation, but I never seem 
to get around to it." As, alack-a-day ! he did not 
get around to me before that occasion, I went, 
packed in the bottom of a trunk, with the young 
man and his wife on their annual holiday. In 
my pitchy gaol I had, of course, no means of cal- 
culating the flight of time, but when I next saw 
the light, after what seemed to me an intermin- 
able spell, I appeared to be the occasion of some 
excitement. The young man brought me up after 
several vigorous dives into the bottom of the 
trunk, as his wife was saying with much energy: 
"Well, of course, you can do as yx)u please, but 
if I were you I'd telegraph an answer right 

[137] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

straight back that I did not propose to spend my 
vacation working for them. The idea ! After all 
you do!" "Oh, well," was the young man's re- 
ply, "some poor dog of an author wrote the thing, 
and it's only right that he should have some kind 
of an answer within a reasonable time. I ought 
to have got around to it long ago." 

Whatever the kind-hearted young man may 
have said about me I was given yet another 
chance. A very business-like chap "took a shot 
at me," as he expressed it, one forenoon at his 
desk. I was considerably distressed, however, by 
the confusion and the multiplicity of interrup- 
tions to which his attention to me was subject. 
When I thought of the sacred privacy devoted 
to my creation, the whole-hearted consecration of 
my dear parent's life-blood to mj^ being, I felt 
that such a reading was little short of criminally 
unjust. And how could any one be expected to 
savour my power and my charm in the midst of 
such distractions? The business-like chap sat 
somewhere near the middle of a vast floor ranged 
with desks. In his immediate neighbourhood a 
score or more of typewriters were clicking and 
perhaps half as many telephones were going. 
The chap's own telephone rang, it seemed to me, 
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MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

every five or six pages, and, resting me the whik 
on his knee, he expectantly awaited the outcome 
of his secretary's answering conversation. At 
frequent intervals he was consulted by colleagues 
as to this and that: covers, jackets, electros, fall 
catalogues, what not? Nevertheless, he got 
through me in rather brisk order. At my con- 
clusion I observed no tears in his eyes. And, it 
was evident, he settled my hash, as the phrase is, 
at this house. 

I certainly felt sick at heart in that express 
car back to the corn belt. My poor parent, when 
I again met him, unwrapped me very tenderly, 
and sat for a long time turning me through very 
dully. I stayed on his desk for several days, and 
then fared forth again on my quest, valued this 
trip at a hundred dollars. 

After the initial formalities, I fell this time 
first into the hands of a driving sort of fellow, 
who had the air of being perpetually up to his 
neck in work, and who handed me to his wife with 
the remark: "Here's another job for you to- 
morrow. Make a careful, working synopsis of 
the story, and I'll dip into the manuscript here 
and there when I come home to get a line on the 
style and general character of the thing." The 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

next night, after rustling energetically through 
me, he wrote out his report, and, passing it to his 
wife, said: "There are no outright mis-state- 
ments of fact as to the plot in that, are there?" 

I next fell in the way of a fashionable char- 
acter just leaving for a week-end, who read me 
in the smoking-car on his way up into the coun- 
try. He burned several holes in my pages with 
the falling ash of his cigarettes. He read me in 
bits between scraps of conversation wath his seat 
neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the fly- 
ing scenery. And he found it rather awkward 
holding me balanced on his legs crooked up 
against the seat in front of him. This, my pre- 
carious position, led to a grievous calamity. I 
toppled and fell, and my reader, making a swoop- 
ing clutch at me as I went, but the more scat- 
tered my pages over the polluted floor of the car. 
An evil draught carried my third page under- 
neath a seat, the third forward from my reader. 
It was an anguishing thing, but I could not cry 
out, I could not tell him: as my reader, cursing 
me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my 
fault) gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far 
enough under the seat before him to perceive my 
page three. 
[140] 



MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

But it does not fall within the scope of my 
present design to extend this chronicle to the 
length of an autobiogi-aphy. With what pain 
and labour my poor parent recovered from his 
memory, and then very imperfectly, of course, 
my third page ; how he grew more melancholy of 
countenance at each of my successive returns to 
the house of my birth and formative years ; how 
I sometimes remained away for months at a time, 
and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to 
a lady in New Jersey who very graciously herself 
forwarded me to my parent; how my poor par- 
ent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapi- 
dation of my appearance to go to the expense of 
having me completely re-typed by a public typist, 
and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote, 
expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation 
of one fii-m of publishers; how I was read by a 
delightful old lady who knitted in her office as 
she read ; by a lady of cosmopolitan mien who had 
me together with many other manuscripts sent 
to her home in a box, and who consumed innu- 
merable cigarettes as she perused me ; by a young 
gentleman who I am sure had a morning "hang 
over" at his desk; by a tough-looking customer 
who wore his hat at his desk; by a young lady of 

[141] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

futurist aspect who took me home to her studio; 
by an old, old man who seemed to "see" me quite, 
and by many more — all this I may merely indi- 
cate. 

One very striking phenomenon I should by no 
means fail to mention, and this uncanny fact may 
be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if it 
is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being 
blue or yellow, as the case may be. One will not 
say of it, "See that lurid yellow object," to have 
another reply, "What! that object directly before 
us? I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black 
as ink." But I was apparently exactly like such 
an impossible object. I was, figuratively speak- 
ing, no colour of my own and I was all colours. 
One, so to speak, saw me as green, another as 
white, and yet another as orange, while some saw 
quite red as they looked at me. That is, my char- 
acter consisted altogether, it seemed, in the amaz- 
ingly diverse reactions I inspired in my successive 
readers. I was intolerably dull, I was abundantly 
entertaining, I was over-subtle, I was painfully 
obvious, I was exceedingly humorous, and I 
lacked all humour. 

How, at length, a group of editorial gamblers 
succeeded in coming sufficiently into harmony 
[142] 



MEMORIES OF A MANUSCRIPT 

about me to render a composite verdict that I 
would be a fair publishing risk ; but how the title 
my poor parent had given me it was unanimously 
held wouldn't do at all; and how I got another 
in book committee meeting; how, after I was 
(wonderful thing!) "accepted," I lay in a safe 
until I thought I should crumble away with age ; 
and how I was suddenly brought forth and hast- 
ily read by the manufacturing department for 
ideas for my cover to be, and then by the adver- 
tising department for *'copy dope," before being 
rushed to the composing room — of these things 
I have not time to speak further, as I am now 
on the press, and am rapidly ceasing to be merely 
a manuscript. 



[143] 



IX 

"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

*'Lavender, sweet lavender, 
Who will buy ray sweet blooming lavender? 
Buy it once, you'll buy it twice. 
And make your clothes sweet and nice !" 

SHE was a wretched-looking creature, with a 
great basket ; and it was so she sang through 
the street. By this you know where we are, for 
this is one of the old cries of London town. 

For the sake of my clothes, and for the noble 
pleasure of associating for an instant with the 
original of a coloured print of old London types, 
I bought a sprig of lavender. "Thank you, sir," 
she said. 

I saw it coming; ah! yes, by now I knew she 
would. "You are an American, sir," she added, 
eyeing me with interest. 

You would think that since the "American in- 
vasion" first began ever so long ago, some time 
after Dicky Davis "discovered" London, they, 
[144] 



"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

the British, would have seen enough of us to have 
become accustomed to us by now. But, as you 
have found, it is not so — ^we are a strange race 
from over the sea. 

"You are an American, sir," said the barmaid. 
She was a huge young woman who could have 
punched my head in. I am not so delicate, either. 
And she had a pug nose. 

"I do not so much care for American ladies," 
she said. "I think they are a bit hard, don't you ?" 
Then, perhaps feeling that she may have offended 
me, she quickly added; "Not of course that I 
doubt that there are maidenlike ladies in Amer- 
ica." 

They are a curious people, these English, with 
their nice ideas, even among barmaids, of the 
graces of a mellow society. For some time I 
could not understand why she was so beautiful. 
Then I perceived that it was because of her nose. 
She looked just like the goddesses of the Elgin 
marbles, whose noses are broken, you know. Still 
I doubt whether it would be a good idea for a 
man to break his wife's nose in order to make 
her more beautiful. 

I will grave her name here on the tablet of 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

fame, so that when you go again to London you 
may be able to see her. It is Elizabeth. 

He was a cats' meat man. And on his arm he 
carried a basket in which was a heap of bits of 
horse flesh ( such I have been told it is ) , each on 
a sliver of stick. There was a little dog playing 
about near by. "Would you care to treat that 
dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat, sir?" asked 
the man. 

I had never before treated a dog to anything, 
though treating is an American habit. So I "set 
up" the dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat. 
"Thank you, sir," said the cats' meat man. I saw 
by the light come into his eye that he had recog- 
nised me. "You are " he began. "I know 

it," I said; "I am." 

I looked at the wretched dog. Would he too 
accuse me? But he ate his meat and said never 
a word. Perhaps he was not an Englishman. No, 
I think he was a tourist, too, like myself. I was 
glad I had befriended him in an alien land. 

"What is the price of this?" I asked. "Thri'- 
pence?" I inquired, reading a sign. 

"Three pence," pronounced the attendant very 
distinctly. It was but his way of saying, "You 
are an American." 
[146] 



"YOU AKE AN AMERICAN" 

I went into an office to see a man I know, 
"How are you?" I said in my democratic way to 
the very small office boy. "You are looking bet- 
ter than when I saw you last," I remarked with 
pleasant home humour. 

"I never saw you before, sir," replied the of- 
fice boy. "He is an American," I heard him, 
apologising for me, tell the typist. 

Some considerable while after this I went to 
this office again. I had quite forgotten the office 
boy. I handed him my card. A bright lad, he. 
"I'm feeling much better, sir," he said. 

In Pall Mall there is a steamship office in the 
window of which is displaj^^ed a miniature sheet 
of water. At opposite sides of this little ocean 
are small dabs of clay, one labelled England, the 
other America. Tiny shij)s ply back and forth 
between the two countries. Observers cannot 
make out how it is that these little boats turn 
about as they do, apparently of their own ac- 
cord. And the scene has continually a num- 
ber of spectators. (This was before the war.) 

One day I was looking in at this window, very 
much interested in this problem. Standing next 
to me was a fine specimen of a Pall Mallian, with 
his silk "topper," his black tail coat, his button- 

[147] 



WAI.KING-STICK PAPERS 

hole, his checked trowsers, his large grey spats, 
his shining boots, his stick and his glass on its 
ribbon, apparently equally absorbed. I turned 
to him after a bit — a quite natural thing to do, 
I thought — and, "How the deuce do you suppose 
that thing works?" I said. 

The tall gentleman slowly turned. Slowly, 
stiffly, with an aristocratic gesture, he raised his 
arm and placed his glass in his eye, for a moment. 
I was frozen by his blank stare, quite through. 
Then he lifted his eyebrow; the glass dropped 
and bounded before him on its ribbon. And he 
turned and walked away. Walked away, I dare 
say, to his frowning club, to tell how he had just 
been set upon in the street and insulted by some 
strange ruffian. But, you see, I didn't know; I 
was an American. 

To Epsom I went in a cart to see the Derby. 
It was at Epsom, you know, that the King's horse 
was thrown several seasons ago by a suffragette 
who lost her life in the act. Well, most of the 
fine gentlemen of England, I think, were there, 
all in splendid tall grey hats and with their field 
glasses slung over their shoulders. And a horde 
of the cleverest crooks in Europe also. 

There I had my pocket *'cut" by a pickpocket. 
[148] 



"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

That is the way they go through you in England, 
neatly lift your pocket out. I thought this was 
an interesting thing, so I told it about that I had 
had my pocket cut, but I did not see any inter- 
national significance in the affair. 

The achievement, however, I discovered was 
much relished by my hearers in England. I, an 
American, had come over there and had my 
pocket cut. He, the crook, an Englishman very 
probably, had been "cuter" than I; he had "had" 
me, an American. 

It is a curious thing, and a fact not generally 
known, I believe, that all decayed taxicab drivers 
in London, those who are unfortunate, have fal- 
len from a high estate. Each and every one 
of them used to drive the London to Oxford 
coach in the days of 'orses. 

I met a number of these personages, fat, with 
remarkably red faces and large honeycombed 
noses. Not at all like the alert, athletic lads, a 
type of mechanical engineer, who have arisen as 
cabbies with the advent of taxis. What do they 
know about 'orses? 

It was such an old boy who drove me from the 
neighbourhood of Russell Square, where I was 
stopping, to Chelsea, where I went into lodgings. 

[149] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

He frequently had the pleasure of driving Amer- 
icans, he remarked. "Thank you, sir," he said. 

I required to have my shoes repaired, and I 
inquired of my landlord where might be found a 
good cobbler. He told me that there was an ex- 
cellent one in Battersea. "In Battersea!" I said. 
"Is there none in Chelsea? How am I to get my 
shoes clear over to Battersea?" 

"Why," he replied, "we will send the cobbler 
a card and he'll send some one over for the boots 
and " 

"And then, I suppose," I said, "he will send 
us another card saying that the boots are done 
and so on. And in the meantime I could have 
had the boots repaired and worn out again." 

Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in 
a piece of newspaper and setting out straight off 
to find a cobbler. But my landlord would not 
hear of such a thing at all. "Of course you are 
an American," he said. 

I gathered that while such a proceeding might 
be all right in my country it wouldn't do in Eng- 
land. He did not want lodgers, I understood, 
going in and out of his house with parcels under 
their arms. It would reflect on him. He was a 
[150] 



"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

man with a lively mind, and he told me a little 
story. 

"How do you like the new lodger?" asked the 
first housemaid of the second. 

"Oh, he's very nice indeed," rephed the second 
housemaid. "But he's not a gentleman. He 
helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday." 

"Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asked the 
errand man in my street. "I haven't had tea to- 
day." 

It's a funny thing, that; isn't it? — our just 
being all "Americans" (when we are not referred 
to as "Yankees" or "Yanks"). We are never 
United Statesians. It is the "American Am- 
bassador," and the "American Consul-General." 
I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the 
"President of America." 

One day I saw a tourist. He was an Ameri- 
can, a young man I knew in New York. I found 
him going into the Houses of Parliament. I was 
fond of going in there frequently, and said I 
would accompany him. 

With an easy stride, at a speed I should say 
of about two miles an hour, he walked straight 
through the Houses of Parliament; through the 
Norman porch, through the King's robing room, 

[151] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

the Royal or Victoria gallery, the Prince's cham- 
ber, the sumptuously decorated House of Peers, 
the Peers' lobby, the spacious central hall, the 
Commons' corridor and the House of Commons; 
glancing about him the while at art and archi- 
tecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal gar- 
ments and symbols of history. Returning to the 
central hall, we passed through St. Stephen's and 
Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street. 

"How long did it take us to do that?" said my 
friend, questioning his watch. 

"Oh, about fifteen minutes," I replied. 

He said he thought he would go across the way 
and "do" the Abbey next while he was in the 
neighbourhood. 

I suppose I could have helped him in the mat- 
ter of despatch, but I didn't think of it at the 
time. Later I heard of two Americans who drove 
up to the abbey in a taxi. Leaping out, one said 
to the other: "You do the outside and I'll do 
the inside, and that way we'll save a lot of time." 

The thing a man does in America, of course, 
when he gets into a railroad train is to light a 
cigar and begin talking to the fellow next to him. 
There were two of us in the railway carriage 
compartment on my way down into Surrey. I 
[152] 



"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

made a number of amiable observations ; I asked 
a number of pleasant questions. My object was 
to while away the time in human companionship. 
"Quite so," was his reply to observations. 

In replying to questions he would commit him- 
self to nothing; he wouldn't even say that he 
didn't know. "I shouldn't undertake to say, sir," 
was his answer. And then, certainly, there was 
no possibility of pursuing the subject further. 

He wasn't reading a paper; he wasn't doing 
anything but gaze straight in front of him. I 
concluded that he was "sore" at me; I concluded 
that he was a surly bear, anyway. And so an 
hour or so passed in utter silence. 

The pretty landscape whirled by; we went 
through a hundred tunnels (more or less) ; the 
little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and 
then ; at old, old railway stations, that remind one 
agreeably of jails, rough-looking men in black 
shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran out to 
the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot 
the gentleman altogether. Till at length we came 
to his station. 

When he had got out he turned to latch the 
door, and putting his head in at the window, he 
said to me in the pleasantest manner possible: 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

"Good aufternoon, sir." He wasn't sore at me 
a bit ! That was simply his fashion of travelling, 
in silence. 

I was going into the countryside, to the coun- 
try places where the old men have pleasant faces 
and the maidens quiet eyes. To fare forth upon 
the King's highway, to hedgerows and blossoms 
and the old lanes of Merrie England, to mount 
again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and dip 
the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the 
heath, brother, to hills and the sea, to lonely 
downs, to hold converse with simple shepherd 
men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to 
seek some ancient inn for warmth in the ingle- 
nook, and bite and drop, and where, when the 
last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would 
rest my weary bones until the sweet choral of 
morning birds called me on my way. 

There was an ancient character going along 
the road. He walked with a staff, a crooked 
stick. His coatless habit was the colour of clay ; 
his legs were bound about just below the knee 
by a strap (wherein, at one side, he carried his 
pipe), so that his trowsers flared at the bottom 
like a sailor's; over his shoulder he bore a flat 
straw basket. Under his chin were whiskers ; his 
[154] 



"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

eyes were merry and bright and his cheeks just 
like fine rosy apples, with a great high light on 
each. I asked of him the way and we trudged 
along together. "You are from Mericy," he said 
with dehght. 

He told me about himself. He was seventy- 
four and he had never had "a single schooling" 
in his life. Capel was his home, a village of about 
twenty houses which we were approaching, thirty 
miles or so from London. The last time he been 
to London was when he was fifteen. He had then 
seen some fireworks there. No fireworks in 
Capel, he said, had ever been able to touch him 
since. He had been pushing on, he said, pushing 
on, pushing on all the while. 

"You were not born in Capel, then?" I said. 

Born in Capel! Why, he had been born seven 
miles from Capel. 

The difficulty was that I had overlooked the 
fact that everybody goes out of London town at 
Whitsuntide. Village and county town I tried 
and I could not find where to lay my head. 
Everything was, as they say in England, "full 
up." It was coming on to rain and the night 
fell chill and black. Would I have to use my 
rucksack for a pillow and sleep in the fields? 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

At length I found a man — it was at quaint 
Godalming, I think, where the famous Charter- 
house School is — who could not give me a room, 
but offered me a bed and breakfast at half a 
crown. "There's another fellow up there," he 
said. "But he's a nice, quiet fellow; something 
like yourself," he said. "I think you'll like him." 

"You are an American," remarked my land- 
lord. I sat with him in his little parlour behind 
the bar. It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a 
great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed 
birds in a glass case. He asked me if I liked 
reading, because, if I did, he had an old dic- 
tionary to which I was welcome at any time. 

At length it was the hour for bed. I followed 
my heavy host with his candle up difficult stairs. 
"I think they're all asleep," he said. 

"They're all asleep!" I exclaimed. "Who 
are?" 

"Why," replied my landlord, "there are five 
of them, you know. But they are nice quiet 
fellows. Something like yourself," he added. "I 
think you will like them." 

In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises 
of many sunk in slumber. Well, they were, I 
found in the morning, rather inoffensive young 
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"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN" 

fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether 
unlike myself. It was after my bacon and eggs 
that I found on my way a place for a "wash and 
brush up, tuppence." 

"Traveller, sir?" inquired the publican, in re- 
sponse to my knock and peering cautiously out 
at his door. For it was Sunday, after three 
o'clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to 
obtain refreshment at a public house at that hour 
one must be a "traveller over three miles' jour- 
ney." "I'm a traveller all the way from the 
U. S. A.," said I. 

I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a 
corner and looked out again from my window 
over the old red roofs and at the back of the house 
where he dwelt who when the Queen had com- 
manded his presence said, "I'm an old man, 
ma'am, and I'll take a seat." When Annie^ the 
maid, had brought my "shaving water, sir," in a 
kind of a tin sprinkling can and when I had used 
it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out 
to see how old Father Thames was coming on. 

I thought I would buy some writing paper and 
I went into a drug store kind of a place. "I see 
you are an American, sir," said the shopman. 
"This is a chemist's shop," he explained; "you 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

get paper at the stationer's, just after the turn- 
ing, at the top of the street." 

Hurrying for my passport, I inquired as to the 
location of such and such a street — whatever the 
name of it is — where, I understood, the place was 
where this was to be had. "Ah!" said he whom I 
addressed, "you want the American Consul-Gen- 
eral." 



[158] 



WHY MEN CAN'T READ NOVELS BY WOMEN 

GEORGE MOORE once presented the idea 
that the only thing of interest and value 
about the creative art of a woman was the femi- 
nine quality of that art. The novels of Jane 
Austen come readily to mind as an argument in 
support of this provocative idea. Quite first 
among their charms, every one will admit, is 
the indisputable fact that no man could possibly 
have written them. They have the lightness, 
brightness, sparkle, perfume, flavour, grace, fun, 
sensitivity of a young feminine mind. No one 
more than Miss Austen has captivated the roar- 
ers among men. A man admires, say, Conrad. 
He — if he is a manly man — falls in love with 
Jane Austen. Very well. 

Now, then, it is a curious and a paradoxical 
thing that no man of masculine character can 
read the novels written by women to-day, unless 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

he has to; that is, unless he is a book-reviewer, 
publisher's reader, magazine editor, proofreader, 
or some such thing. And the reason he can't do 
it, in view of George Moore's idea and Miss Aus- 
ten's renowned magnetism, is curious indeed. It 
is because of the peculiarly feminine attitude of 
mind of our present women-novelists. At least, 
this is the arresting pronouncement delivered 
with much robust eloquence by my leonine friend. 
Colonel Bludgeon. 

The present writer (a pale, spectacled, mid- 
dle-aged young man) is too conscious of the won- 
drous nature of women to question their ability 
in anything. But of one of whom he stands in 
greater awe than of anything else in the world 
he is a humble friend. The dictum of this my 
friend comes from a quite different character 
than myself. He is a great man; he has read 
everything; seen ever}i;hing; known everybody. 
Exception to him could be taken only on one 
ground. He is perfectly awful. He belongs to 
an old school ; splenetic, choleric. He is Sir- An- 
thony- Absolute-like ; a critic in the spirit of the 
thundering days of William Ernest Henley. His 
face is like a beefsteak. His frame is like "a 
mountain walking." His voice, Johnsonian. He 
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NOVELS BY WOMEN 

knows more about literature than probably any- 
other living man. 

*'No, sir," he rumbled, "you cannot find to-day 
a cigar-smoking animal" (though the Colonel is 
so erudite a man^ his language is terrible) "who 
could be lured into the pages of our women nov- 
elists without snorts — snorts, sir — of disgust, or 
bellows of derisive mirth. Why? Because these 
pages no longer contain an acute transcript of 
life as only a sensitive feminine mind would have 
the cunning to observe it, and of a form of hu- 
man life in itself highly feminine in its character, 
but they now present a singularly insular trav- 
esty of man, an unconscious caricature of man as 
he could only appear to a feminine mind bound 
by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that 
is, devoid of masculine understanding, unable to 
recognise by virtue of affiliation of instinct that 
which is fine in the male character and that which 
is false to type. 

"Sir," continued the Colonel, "these pictures 
are coloured, on one hand, by ludicrous prejudice 
against masculine quahties which the feminine 
nature temperamentally feels to be antagonistic,, 
or dangerous, to itself; and, on the other hand, 
by sentimental worship of masculine attributes 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

conceived to be desirable complements to the 
frailty of women. This amusing view of man 
springs not only from the element of sex, as I 
have said, but from the very marrow of sex. We 
do not get from the contemporary authoress crea- 
tive literature at all ; that is, a disinterested criti- 
cism of mankind; we get in each picture of a 
male character her instinctive, and intensely in- 
terested, feeling as to whether or not he is a man 
whom it would be desirable, and safe, for a young 
woman to marry. Paradoxically enough, it would 
seem that women have less and less knowledge 
of the world as they have contrived to see more 
of it ; that as they have become more emancipated 
in liberty of action they have become more clan- 
nish in thought; and that as the range of their 
opportunities has widened and their interests 
have multiplied, their concern with the most ele- 
mental female instinct, their preoccupation with 
their immemorial business of the chase, has but in- 
tensified. By word of mouth the modern woman 
tells us that in her practical and intellectual ca- 
pacities she has advanced far beyond her sisters 
of an earher day; we chance to look into that 
pool of fiction wherein she mirrors her heart, and 
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NOVELS BY WOMEN 

we find her the same self-centred huntress as of 
yore. 

"Sir," cried the Colonel, jolting some tobacco 
ash off the ledge made by his abdomen, which 
he did by pounding the side of his torso with a 
bulky volimie of the "Autobiography of Ben- 
venuto Cellini," "what is the theme of the most 
conspicuous portion of our fiction by feminine 
hands? In large measure it is a peevish criti- 
cism of husbands. We have the popular creator 
of a type of husband held up to the scorn and 
ridicule of the sorority of her readers, remark- 
ing by way of commentary on her satirical pic- 
tures that there should be 'a school for husbands.' 
It is, apparently, this lady's complacent belief 
that the origin of the domestic difiiculties of the 
world is in the inadequate training of husbands 
for their delicate office. One of 'the essential re- 
quirements' for marriage which 'men should go 
to school to learn' she mentions as 'understand- 
ing.' Wives, presumably, are born perfectly 
equipped for their functions and do not require 
to be made. At any rate, as the production of 
fiction nowadays is so largely a feminine indus- 
try, and as a dominant trait of the male, even 
when recording his observations, is his chivalrous 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

point of view, there is little or no opportunity 
given us on the benches, as you might say, to 
catch a glimpse of life pointing a way for us to 
see it steadily and see it whole." 

The Jovian Colonel blew a heavy cloud of to- 
bacco smoke from out his massive ebony beard, 
and sat for a moment looking like some porten- 
tous smouldering volcano; then continued: 

"Men with hair on their chests would find the 
most agreeable society in the pages of our women 
novelists to be that of the horrible or, as the case 
may be, pitiful scoundrels at whom the authors 
themselves are most indignant. These miserable 
beings, generally amiable though rather purpose- 
less spirits, are, as Colonel Harvey not long ago 
remarked of one of them, of a sort that ahnost all 
men like and hardly any woman can tolerate. 
Men are free to enjoy their engaging qualities 
because men are not subject to possible misfor- 
tune by reason of the corresponding infirmities of 
such characters, that is, men are not dependent 
upon them for their own safety. Women, on the 
other hand, fear such characters because instinct 
tells women that they could not trust their own 
comfortable security to them ; and, consequently, 
women heartily dislike such as these and find them 
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NOVELS BY WOMEN 

villainous, beings to be branded in any feminine 
discussion of life as enemies of the sex. 

"In the latest novel by one of our most promi- 
nent women novelists," the Colonel went on, "for 
months the best-selling book in the country, and 
also undoubtedly the work of an artist sincerely 
interpreting the world according to her lights, 
we are presented with a distressing scene, an in- 
cident holy horror at which would make a thrill- 
ing and delicious success of any tea party. An 
undisciplined young pup who is the husband 
comes home a bit late one night, and, as a man 
would describe it, somewhat 'lit up.' An earnest 
student of this story cannot find that this mis- 
guided youth was any worse than is ordinarily 
the case in such delinquencies. It is intimated, 
however, that he has been this way before. The 
horror, the loathing, which the humorous young 
scamp's weakness inspires in his wife, a young 
woman of thoroughly feminine loftiness of char- 
acter, is dramatic indeed, and partakes of the na- 
ture of that which so frequently is occasioned by 
the nervous organism of women, a 'scene.' The 
total lack of large-hearted and intelligent 'under- 
standing' of human nature displayed by the con- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

duct of the young man would send any connubial 
craft on to the rocks." 

The Colonel mopped his brow with a large 
bandanna handkerchief. "Sir," he resumed, "ob- 
noxious as it is to a sensible man to do so, let us 
glance at the hero type of the most popular recent 
novels by women, the figure which strikes ad- 
miration into the feminine soul. Now," he roared 
(and I declare, my hair rose on end), "the most 
awful thing any nigger can call another is a 'nig- 
ger.' So we all rebel against what we feel to be 
the weaknesses of our own position. None so 
quick as the vulgar to denounce 'no gentleman.' 
And so on. Thus, as we see, there is nothing the 
weaker sex so much despises in a man as weak- 
ness of character, and, as is consistent with all 
such reactions of feeling, nothing which so much 
attracts it as a firmness and strength of will be- 
yond itself. Naturally, the adored figures in the 
popular women's fiction are always of the 'strong 
man' type, in feminine eyes. And here we come 
to a most extraordinary obliquity of the feminine 
eye. 

"What," he demanded, "are the marks by 
which you are to know a 'strong man' — in the 
feminine picture? A strong man, of course, is a 
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NOVELS BY WOMEN 

man with the bark on ; pohsh is incompatible with 
rugged strength. An exhilarating air of brusque- 
ness breathes from all strong men. They are as 
ignorant of manners as they are of the effete 
conventions of grammar. They have fought their 
way up, and no one can down them. They can 
be depended upon absolutely as what are called 
'good providers.' In short, by the written con- 
fession of her heart, woman's idea of a 'dear/ 
after several centuries more or less of civilisation, 
remains precisely the primitive conception that it 
was in the days when man wooed her by grab- 
bing her by the hair and handing her one with 
a club." 

The Colonel was breathing heavily with the 
exertion of animated speech as he added: "In 
real life a man of any stability of judgment would 
be decidedly suspicious of the hero of a modern 
woman's novel if one should walk into his office, 
or, doubtless, he would observe this whimsical 
caricature with something of the amusement he 
would find in the ludicrously false comic Irish- 
man of the vaudeville stage. This irreverent 
flight of fancy on our part, however, is yanking 
the strong man from his appropriate and sup- 
porting setting, where paste is given the glow of 

[167] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

an authentic stone; in the sjnnpathetic pages 
created by feminine intuition he dominates the 
machine. When the heroine takes into her own 
hands the right of the individual to a second 
chance for happiness," the Colonel declaimed with 
a demoniac grin, "she turns to experience with 
such a one perfect love, as the honoured wife of 
a splendid and prosperous man and the mother of 
beautiful children. 

"The ethics of that engrossing theme of di- 
vorce," the Colonel went on, lighting another 
corpulent and very black cigar, "as decided by 
the Supreme Court of our contemporary women 
novelists suggests that justly celebrated princi- 
ple of perfect equity : * What's yours is mine and 
what's mine is my own.' Listen," he demanded; 
"listen (as the author of 'The Gentle Art of Mak- 
ing Enemies' was wont to introduce his lectures) 
to the story of the unfolding of a woman's heart 
through marriage, as it is unfolded in the recent 
book of a novelist whom both the million-headed 
crowd and shoals of reviewers, of very uneven 
critical equipment, place 'well forward among 
America's novelists.' A penniless young woman 
brought up amid the standards of very common 
people marries for money, and comes to face the 
[168] 



NOVELS BY WOMEN 

collapse of her dreams. She realises that she is 
tied to a man for whom she cares nothing. Also 
he is a brute, a typical bad egg of a husband from 
the extensive though rather monotonous stock of 
this article dealt in by our women novelists. Is 
it right for this young woman to throw away the 
chances of her whole life for happiness — and so 
on? It certainly should not seem so to readers 
of the book. And it is natural enough, as her 
husband has totally failed to hold her, that this 
young woman's mind, and heart, too, should con- 
vince her that she may make what she regards 
as a wiser disposition of her life. 

"The inevitable strong man whom she event- 
ually marries seems unfortunately to have a bit 
of a flaw in his granite character; at any rate, 
something is wrong with him, as the heroine fails 
to hold him altogether, and matters even begin 
to look as though she might lose him. But with 
her great happiness had come a new standard of 
honour, and a distrust of divorce as the solution 
of any marital problem. Would it be right for 
her to lose a husband who has tired of her? Not 
by a long shot! Marriage is the one vow we take 
before God. It is a contract. Is it not against 
all moral law to break a contract? And all the 

[169] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

rest of it. So feminine logic disposes of what is 
described as one of the great problems of the 
day." 

Suddenly the Colonel broke into a terrifying 
smile. "This novelist of whom we have just been 
speaking," he said, "somewhere remarked in an 
interview that it was too bad about poor George 
Gissing — ^where she picked up Gissing, God only 
knows — as, writing away all his life at stuff peo- 
ple didn't care for, he was one of the tragedies 
of literature. Well, Gissing may be dead and 
gone, but his works stick on. I could tell her" — 
the Colonel glared as he pawed his enormous hand 
through his mane — "of a more profound tragedy 
of literature." 



[170] 



XI 

THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

BIRDS of a feather flock together, you can 
tell a dog by its spots, a man is known by 
the company he keeps — and all that sort of thing. 

It is quite astonishing that nobody has before 
been struck by what I have in my eye. People 
go round all the while writing about Old Green- 
wich Village, the harbour, the Ghetto, the walk 
uptown. Coney Island, the Great White Way, 
the subway ride. Riverside Drive, the spectacle of 
Fifth Avenue, the Night Court, the "lungs" of 
the metropolis, the "cliff dwellers," "faith, hope, 
and charity" on University Heights — a cathedral, 
a university, and a hospital, "lobster palace so- 
ciety," the "grand canons" of lower Manhattan, 
and about every other part of and thing in New 
York except this most entertaining section which 
I am about to discuss. 

Now, I never lived on Mars 

You know "Sunday stories" in the newspapers 

[171] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

are continually bringing a gentleman resident on 
Mars to marvel, with his fresh vision, at the won- 
ders of this world. 

As I say, I never lived on Mars, but, what 
amounts to the same thing in this case, perhaps, 
I did live all of my New York life, up to a short 
time ago, below Forty-second Street. I gathered 
from reading and conversation that there were 
districts of the city above this where people dwelt 
and went about their daily affairs, just, I sup- 
posed, as fish do at the bottom of the ocean, and 
beasts in the jungle. But I knew that I could not 
breathe at the bottom of the ocean, nor be com- 
fortable in the jungle. 

However, it's this way. The person to whom 
I am married declared that she could not live 
below Forty-second Street; said that that was 
not done at all, nobody "lived" below Forty-sec- 
ond Street. So the matter was settled. I moved 
"uptown." Of course, by stealth I continue to 
visit the neighbourhood of Gramercy Park, as a 
dog, it is said, will return to that which is not nice. 

The beauties and the advantages of the region 

in which I now live have been pointed out to me. 

It is quite true that everything hereabout is new 

and "clean." Here the streets are not infested 

[172] 



THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

by "old bums" as those are in that dirty old down- 
town. Here one is just between the beautiful 
Drive on the one hand and our handsome Central 
Park on the other. Here there is fresh air. 
Here Broadway is a boulevard, and, further, it 
winds about in its course like the roads, as they 
call them there, in London, and does not have 
that awful straight look of everything in that 
checker-board part of town. Here everybody is 
well dressed. And even the grocers' and butch- 
ers' shops are quite smart. All this is indis- 
putable. 

But all this is a description of the physical as- 
pects of this part of town. What I purpose to 
do is an esoteric thing. Through the outward 
aspects of this part of town, its vestments, the 
features of its physiognomy, I will show, as 
through a glass, the beatings of its heart. I will 
exhibit the soul of it, interpret its spirit, make 
plain for him that runs its inner, hidden meaning. 

The part of town that I mean may be said to 
begin at Seventy-second Street; it runs along 
Broadway, and comprises the neighbourhood of 
Broadway, to, say, a bit above One Hundred and 
Tenth Street. Now we shall see what we shall 
see. 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

You remember what a celebrated irascible 
character said about a circulating library in a 
town. Be that as it may. As you stroll along 
Broadway, up from Seventy-second Street, you 
observe, being a person of highly alert mind, an 
astonishing number of circulating libraries, de- 
voted exclusively to the latest fiction. And you 
note that all corner drug stores and all stationers' 
shops present a window display of "50-cent fic- 
tion." Ah ! refinement. Reading people are nice 
people ; they are not rough people. There is, you 
feel at once, an air, there is taste — how shall I 
say? — selectness, about this part of town. It is 
not as other parts of town are. 

Ycm perceive, as you continue your stroll with 
a brightened and a more perfumed mind, 
that there are no shoe stores here. Shoo 
stores!! "Booteries," these are. Combined with 
"hosieries." Countless are the smart hat shops 
for women. That is to say, the establishments of 
"chapeaux importers." In the miniature par- 
lours framed by the windows' glass these chic and 
ravishing creations, the chapeaux, rise in a row 
high upon their slim and lovely stems. This one 
is the establishment of Mile. Edythe, that of 
Mme. Vigneau. Countless, too, are the terres- 
[174] 



THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

trial heavens devoted to "gowns." Headless 
they stand, these symphonies in feminine apparel, 
side by side here in the windows of the Maison 
la Mode, there of the Maison Estelle. Frequent 
are the places where the figure is cultivated with 
famous corsets, the retreats of "corsetieres" ; this 
one before you bears the name Fayette; it is 
where the model "Madame Pompadour" is sold. 
And numerous are shops luxuriating in waists, 
"blouses," lingerie, and "novelties" of dress. 
Conspicuous among them, the "Dolly Dimple 
Shop." The many "furriers" here all deal in 
"exclusive" furs and their names all end in "sky." 

And there are roses, roses all the way. That 
is to say, "roseries," "violeteries," and the like — 
what we call florists' shops, you know. Spots of 
gorgeous colour and intense fragrance, heaped 
high with orchids, violets, roses, gardenias, or, in 
some cases, "artificial flowers." 

See! the luscious wax busts in the window. 
With their grandes coift'ures. And their pink 
and yellow bosoms resplendent with gems. It 
is a hair-dresser's, just as in London, with a gen- 
tlemen's parlour at the back. "Structures" are 
made here in human hair, and "marcel waving" 
is done, not, however, we may suppose, for gen- 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

tlemen. Here may be had an "olive oil sham- 
poo," and a "facial massage." One could be 
"manicured" in the stroll you are taking every 
ten minutes or so, if one wished. And "hair 
cutting" is done along this way by artistes from 
various lands. There is, for instance, the Pelu- 
queria Espanola. "Service," too, is offered "at 
residence." Beauty here is held in esteem as it 
was among the Greeks. Upon one side of the 
"chemist's" vdndow "toilet requisites" are an- 
nounced for sale. The "valet system" is exten- 
sively advertised. The industry of "dry cleans- 
ing" flourishes, and the "shoe renovator" abounds. 
And hats are "renovated," and "blocked," and 
"ironed," in places without number. 

What a delightful tea-room is this! With its 
woodwork, its panelling, and its little window lat- 
tices, all in beautiful enamelled white. That is 
not a tea-room! I'm 'sprised at you. That is 
a laundry. A laundry? Shades of Hop Loo! 
It is even so. There are a variety of types of 
laundry in this part of the world, but the great 
point of them all is their "sanitary" character. 
All things are sanitary here ; the shaving brushes 
at the barber's are proclaimed sanitary ; "sanitary 
tailoring" is announced; and the creameries of 
[176] 



THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

this district, it would seem, go beyond anything 
yet achieved elsewhere in the way of sanitation. 
It might be imagined from a study of window 
signs that a perverse person bent upon procuring 
un-"pasteurized" milk in this part of town would 
be frustrated of his design. 

I was sent to what my understanding conceived 
to be the "bakery" in our immediate neighbour- 
hood, on an errand. This place, I found, was 
called the "Queen Elizabeth." I was dreadfully 
abashed when I got inside. I was afraid that 
there might be some bit of mud on my shoes which 
would soil the polished floor; and I became 
keenly conscious that my trowsers were not per- 
fectly pressed. I should, of course, have worn 
my tail-coat. There were several ladies there 
receiving guests that afternoon. I had a tete-a- 
tete with one of these, who gossiped pleasantly 
about the cakes — I was to get some cakes. The 
nicest cakes at the "Queen Elizabeth," it seems, 
are of two kinds: "Maids of Court" and "Ladies 
in Waiting." Our neighbourhood is rich in shops 
given to "pastry," "sweets," "bon bons." Shops 
of charming names! There is the "Ambrosia 
Confection Shop," and the place of the "Patis- 
serie et Confiserie." 

ri77:i 



WALKING-STICK rAPEUS 

In our neighbourhood there are, too, a vast 
nimiber of "caterers" and "fruiterers," and, par- 
ticularly, delicatessen shops. Delicatessen shops 
in our neighbourhood are described upon the win- 
dows as places dealing in "fancy and table luxu- 
ries." I have heard my wife say that many peo- 
ple "just live out of them." They are certainly 
handsome places. Why, you wouldn't think 
there was any food in them. Everything is so 
dressed up that it doesn't look at all as if it were 
to eat, it is so attractive. 

Restaurants hereabouts are commonly named 
"La Parisienne," or something like that, or are 
called "rotisseries." There are some just ordi- 
nary restaurants, too, and many immaculate, 
light-lunch rooms. "Afternoon Tea" is a fre- 
quent sign, and one often sees the delicate sug- 
gestion in neat gilt, "Sandwiches." Grocers in 
this part of town, it would seem, handle only 
"select," "fancy," and "choice" groceries, and 
"hot-house products." There are a number of 
fine "markets" in this district, very fine markets 
indeed. In the season for game, deer and bears 
may be seen strung up in front of them ; all their 
chickens appear to come from Philadelphia, their 
ducks are "fresh killed Long Island ducks," and 
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THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

they make considerable of a feature of "frogs' 
legs." These markets are usually called the 
"Superior Market," or the "Quality Market," or 
something like that. Great residential hotels 
here bear the name of "halls," as "Brummel 
Hall" on the one hand and "Euripides Hall" on 
the other. 

You will by now have begun to perceive the 
note, the flair, of my part of town. Its care is 
for the graces, the things that sweeten life, the 
refinements of civilisation, the embellishments of 
existence. Nothing more clearly, strikingly, be- 
speaks this than the proofs of its extraordinary 
fondness for art — I have mentioned literature. 
Painting and sculpture, music, the drama, and 
the art of "interior decoration," these things of 
the spirit have their homes without number along 
this stretch of Broadway. 

"Art" shops and art "galleries" are on every 
hand. In the windows of these places you will 
see: innumerable French mirrors; stacks of 
empty picture frames of French eighteenth-cen- 
tury design, at an amazingly cheap figure each; 
remarkably inexpensive reproductions in bright 
colours of Sir Joshua, Corot, Watteau, Chardin, 
Fragonard, some Italian Madonnas; an assort- 

[179] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ment of hunting prints, and prints redolent of 
Old English sentiment; many wall "texts," or 
"creeds"; a variety of the kind of coloured pic- 
tures technically called, I believe, "comics"; 
numerous little plaster casts of anonymous works 
and busts of standard authors ; frequently an am- 
bitious original etching by an artist unknown to 
you; and an occasional print of the "September 
Morn" kind of thing; together with many "art 
objects" and a great deal of "bric-a-brac." Up- 
on the windows you are informed that "restor- 
ing," "artistic framing," "regilding," and "resil- 
vering" are done within. And, in some cases, 
that "miniatures" are painted there. There are, 
too, a number of "Japanese art stores" along the 
way, containing vast stocks of Japanese lilies* 
living in Japanese pans, other exotic blossoming 
plants, pink and yellow slippers from the Orient, 
and striking flowered garments like a scene from 
a "Mikado" opera. 

In this part of town photography, too, is made 
one of the fine arts. You do not here have your 
photograph taken ; you have, it seems, your "por- 
trait" made. "Home portraiture" is ingratiat- 
ingly suggested on lettered cards, and, further, 
you are invited to indulge in "art posing in photo* 
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THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

graphs." The "studios" of the photographers 
display about an equal number of portraits of 
children and dogs. The people of this commun- 
ity take joy not only in the savour of art, and in 
taking part in its professional production, but 
they would themselves produce it, as amateurs. 
The sign "Kodaks" is everywhere about, and 
"enlarging" is done, and "developing and print- 
ing for amateurs" every few rods. So we come 
to the subject of music. 

Caruso, Melba, Paderewski, Mischa Elman, 
Harry Lauder, Sousa, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, 
Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, Moszkowsky, the 
"latest song hit" from anything you please. Ask 
and you will find along this thoroughfare. There 
are no more prosperous looking bazaars on this 
street than those consecrated to the sale of "musi- 
cal phonographs" of every make. And if the 
name of these places is not exactly legion, it is 
something very like that. Besides every species 
of Victophone and Olagraph, the music lover may 
muse upon the wonders and the variety of "me- 
chanical piano players." All of de luxe "tone 
quality." 

As for the drama. The brightest word at 
night in this galaxy of ultra signs is the gracious 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

word "Photo Play House." Deep beyond plum- 
met's sound is the interest of this part of town in 
the human story, as revealed upon the '**screen." 
Grief and mirth, good and evil, danger and dar- 
ing, and the horizon from Hatteras to Matapan 
may be scanned upon the poster boards before 
the entrances of these showy temples of the 
mighty film. Here one is invited to witness 
"Carmen," and also a "drama of hfe," "Tricked 
by a Victim," and also "a comedy drama full of 
pep" entitled "Good Old Pop," productions of 
the "Premier Picture Corporation." Announce- 
ments of scenes of tornadoes, the Great War, 
of "Paris fashions," and, ah, yes! of "beauty 
films" line the way. 

To turn to the home. The people of this part 
of town dwell, according to their shops, entirely 
amid "period and art furniture." And it would 
seem, by the remarkable number of places in this 
quarter where this is displayed for sale, that they 
dwell amid a most amazing amount of it. These 
marts of household gods are of two kinds: ones 
of imposing size, with 'long windows stretching 
far down the cross street, and dealing in shining 
"reproductions," and the tiny, quaint, intimate, 
delightful kind of thing, where it is said on a sign 
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THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

on a gilded chair that "artistic picture hanging 
by the hour" is done. 

The fascinating places are the more alluring. 
Herein rich jumbles are, of tapestries, clocks of 
all periods — including a harvest of those of the 
"grandfather" era — fire-screens, brass kettles, 
andirons, stained-glass, artistic lamps in endless 
variety, the latest things in pillow cushions, book 
racks, wall papers, wall "decorations" and "hang- 
ings," draperies, curtains, cretonnes. The "deco- 
rators" deal, too, in "parquet floors," and flourish 
and increase in their kind in response, evidently, 
to the volume of demand for "upholstering" and 
"cabinet v/ork." And the floors of this part of 
town must«hold rich stores of Oriental rugs, as 
importers of these are frequent on our way. 

The higher civilisations turn, naturally, to re- 
finements of religious thought. What the Salva- 
tion Army is to Fourteenth Street, what the 
Rescue Mission is to the Bowery, the Christian 
Science Reading Room is to this stretch of 
Broadway, and there is no trimmer place to be 
seen on your stroll. Then, one of the marks of 
our culture to-day is the aesthetic cultivation of 
the primitive. Our neighbourhood is invited, on 
placards in windows, to assemble "every Sunday 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

evening" to enjoy the "love stories of the Bible." 
For the rest, you would see on your stroll, for 
man cannot live by taste and the spirit alone, sun- 
dry places of business concerned with real estate, 
electrical accoutrement, automobile accessories, 
toys, the investment and safeguarding of treas- 
ure, and so on, and particularly with ales, wines, 
liquors, and cigars. Each and all of these, how- 
ever, are affirmed to be "places of quality." 

Now, the social customs of this part of toTMi, 
as they may be abimdantly viewed on our thor- 
oughfare, are agreeable to observe. At night our 
boulevard twinkles with lights like a fairyland. 
The view of across the way through the gardens, 
as they should be called, down the middle of the 
street, is enchanting. All aglow our spic-and- 
span trolley cars — all our trolley cars are spic- 
and-span — ride down the way like "floats" in a 
nocturnal parade. Upon the sidewalks are 
happy throngs, and a hum of cheery sound. The 
throngs of our neighbourhood are touched with 
an indescribable character of place; they are not 
the throngs of anj'^vhere else. They are not ex- 
actly Fifth Avenue; they are not the Great 
White Way. They are nice throngs, healthy 
throngs, care-free throngs, modish throngs in the 
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THE DESSERT OF LIFE 

ijj(Kles of magazine advertisements. And all 
their members are young. 

You will notice as you go and come that you 
pass the same laughing groups in precisely the 
same spot, hour after hour. Those who compose 
these groups seem to be calling upon one another. 
Apparently, on pleasant evenings, it is the form 
here for you to receive your guests in this way, 
in the open air. And you jest, and converse, and 
while the time amiably away, just as many peo- 
ple do at home. "Well," says my wife, "the 
rooms in the apartments in this part of town are 
so small that nobody can bring anybody into 
them." 



[185] 



XII 

A CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

A CLERK may look at a celebrity. For a 
number of years, we, being diligent in our 
business, stood and waited before kings in a cele- 
brated book shop. Now (like Casanova, retired 
from the world of our triumphs and adventures) 
we compose our memoirs. "We know from per- 
sonal experience that a slight tale, a string of 
gossip, will often alter our entire conception of 
a personality," — from a contemporary book re- 
view. This, the high office of tittle-tattle, is what 
we have in our eye. We are Walpolian, Pepy- 
sian. 

"These Memoirs, Confessions, Recollections, 
Impressions (as the title happens) are extremely 
valuable in the pictures they contain of the time. 
Especially happy are they in the intimate 
glimpses they give us of the distinguished people, 
particularly the men of letters, of the day. The 
writer was an attache of the court," the writer 
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CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

was this, the writer was that, but always the 
writer had peculiar facilities for observing inti- 
mately — and so forth. So it was with the writer 
here. 

We remember with especial entertainment, we 
begin, the first time we saw F. Hopkinson Smith. 
(We are ashamed to say that he was known 
among our confrere, the salesmen, as "Hop" 
Smith.) He introduced himself to us by his 
moustache. Looming rapidly and breezily upon 
us — "Do you know me?" he said, swelling out his 
"genial" chest (so it seemed) and pointing, with 
a militarish gesture, to this decoration. We 
looked a moment at this sea gull adornment, 
somehow not unfamiliar to us, and said, "We do." 
Mr. Hopkinson Smith, we perceived, regards 
this literary monument, so to say, as a household 
word (to put it so) in every home in the land. 
Mr. Smith, a very robust man, wore yellow, sul- 
phur-coloured gloves, a high hat, a flower in his 
buttonhole, white piping to his vest. A debonair 
figure, Chanticleerian. Fresh complexion. Ex- 
haling a breeze of vigour. Though not short in 
stature, he is less tall than, from the air of his 
photographs, we had been led to expect. A sur- 
prise conveying a curious effect, reminded one of 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

that subconscious sensation experienced in the 
presence of a one-time tall chair which has been 
lowered a little by having had a section of its legs 
sawed off. 

Mr. Smith's conversation with book clerks we 
found to be confined to inquiries (iterated upon 
each reappearance) concerning the sale of his 
own books. We appreciate that this may not be 
the expression of an irrestrainable vanity, or ob- 
sessing greed, realising that very probably his 
professional insight into human character informs 
him that the subject of the sales of books is the 
range of the book clerk's mind. He expressed a 
frank and hearty pride (engaging in aspect, we 
felt) in the long-sustained life of "Peter," which 
remarkably selling book survived on the front 
fiction table all its contemporaries, and in full 
vigour lived on to see a new generation grow up 
around it there. In a full-blooded, sporting 
spirit Mr. Smith asked us if his new book was 
"selling faster than John Fox's." Heartiness 
and geniality is his role. A man built to win and 
to relish popularity. With a breezy salute of 
the sulphur-gloved hand, he is gone. Immedi- 
ately we feel much less electric. 

Alas, what aniawful thing! Oliver Herford, 



CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

with heavily dipped pen poised, is about to auto- 
graph a copy of his "Pen and Ink Puppet," when, 
lo ! a monstrous ink blot spills upon the fair page. 
Hideous! Mr. Herfoi^ is nonplused. The 
book is ruined. No! Mr. Herford is not Mr. 
Herford for nothing. The book is enriched in 
value. Sesame! With his pen Mr. Herford 
deftly touches the ink blot, and it is a most amus- 
ing human silhouette. How characteristic an 
autograph, his delighted friend will say. 

We were quite satisfied in the introduction 
given us in our sojourn as a book clerk with Mr. 
Herford. That is to say, our early education 
was received largely from the pages of St. Nicho- 
las Magazine; and when grown to man's estate 
and brought to mingle with the gi'eat we might 
easily have suffered a sentimental disappoint- 
ment in Mr. Herford. But no, he is as mad as a 
March hare. He never, we should say, has any 
idea where he is. An absolutely blank face. 
Mind far, far away. Doesn't act as though he 
had any mind. A smallish, clean-shaven man, 
light sack suit, somewhat crumpled. A fine 
shock of greyish -hair. Cane hooked over crooked 
arm. List to starboard, like a postman. Ap- 
proaches directly toward us. We prepare to 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

render our service. Perceives something in his 
path (us) just in time to avert a collision, swerves 
to one side. Takes an oblique tack. But speaks 
(always particular to avoid seeming to slight 
us) in a very friendly fashion. Though gives 
you the impression that he thinks you are some 
one else. A pleasant, unaffected man to talk to. 
Somewhat dazed, however, in effect. Curious 
manner of speech, of which evidently he is un- 
conscious, partly native English accent, partly 
temperamental idiosyncrasy. A very simple ec- 
centric, what in the eighteenth century was called 
"an original." Heads popular novels. 

It was given to us to see the launching throes 
of a nouveau novelist. We noticed day after day 
a well-built young man come in to gaze at the 
fiction table, a sturdy, spirited, comely chap. A 
fine snap to his eye we particularly noticed, and 
admired. He seemed to derive much satisfaction 
from this occupation and to be in an excellent 
frame of mind. And then, it struck us, he grew 
of troubled mien. He asked us one day how 
"Predestined" was selling. So we had the psy- 
chology of the situation. He asked, on another, 
if we had sold a copy of "Predestined" yet. A 
few days following he inquired, "How long does 
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CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

it take before a book gets started? Dejected was 
his mien. It took "Predestined" some time. Then 
it went very well. We sold a joyous-looking 
Stephen French Whitman, an embodiment of 
gusto — there was a positive crackle to his fine 
black eyes — a pile of books concerning themselves 
with Europe, and did not see him again for some 
time. Then he flashed upon us a handsome new 
moustache. 

Our acquaintance with Mrs. Wharton was — 
merely formal. "Oh," very pleased exclaimed 
an equiline lady, patrician unmistakable, of aris- 
tocratic features which we recognised from the 
portraits of magazines, "I'll take this." She had 
in her hand a copy of the then quite new pocket 
edition "Poems" of George Meredith. She was 
very fashionably, strikingly, gowned, somewhat 
conspicuously; a large pattern in the figure of 
the cloth. She carried a little dog. There was 
about her something, difficult to denote, brilliant 
and hard in effect, like a polished stone. And 
we felt the rarefied atmosphere of a wealthy, 
highly cultivated, rather haughty society. 
"Charge to Edward Wharton," she said, very 
nicely, bending over us as we wrote "Lenox, 
Mass." She pronounced it not Massachusetts, 

[191] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

but Mass, as is not infrequent in the East. 
"Thank you," she said; she swept from us. Our 
regard was won to this incarnation of distinction 
by the pleasant humanity of her manners, her 
very gracious "Good morning" to the elevator 
man as she left. 

"Dicky" Davis we always called him behind 
his back. And such he looks. A man of "strap- 
ping" physique, younger in a general effect than 
probably he is; immense chest and shoulders, 
great "meaty" back; constructed like (we pic- 
ture) those gladiators Borrow lyi-ically acclaims 
the "noble bruisers of old England" ; complexion 
(to employ perhaps an excessive stylistic re- 
straint) not pale. A heavy stick. A fondness 
for stocks. Very becoming. A vitality with an 
aversion, apparently, to wearing an overcoat in 
the coldest weather; deeming this probably an 
appurtenance of the invalid. Funny style of 
trowsers as if made for legs about a foot longer. 
In the reign of "high waters"! 

We had picked up tlie notion that Mr. Davis 
was a snobbish person; we found him a very 
friendly man; gentle, describes it, in manner. 
Very respectful to clerks. "One of the other gen- 
tlemen here ordered another book for me," he 
[192] 



CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

mentions. But more. A sort of camaraderie. 
Says, one day, that he just stepped in to dodge 
some people he saw coming. Inquires, "Well, 
what's going on in the book world?" Buys 
travel books, Africa and such. Buys a quart of 
ink at a clip. He conveyed to us further, uncon- 
sciously, perhaps, a subtle impression that he was, 
in sympathy with us, on our side, so to say; in any 
difficulty, that would be, that might arise; with 
"the boys," iti a manner of speaking. Veteran 
globe trotter and soldier of fortune on the earth's 
surface, Mr. Davis suiFered a considerable shock 
to discover in tete-a-tete that we had never been 
in London. London? Such a human vegetable, 
we saw, was hardly credible. 

"Charge," he said, "to James Huneker," He 
pronounced his name in a very eccentric fashion, 
the first syEable like that in "hunter." In our 
commerce with the world we have, with this rather 
important exception, invariably heard this "u" 
as in "humid." A substantial figure, very erect 
in carriage, supporting his portliness with that 
physical pride of portly men, moving with the 
dignity of bulk; a physiognomy of Rodinesque 
modelling. His cane a trim touch to the en- 
semble. Decidedly affable in manner to us. 

[193] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

"Very nice man/' comments our hasty note. 
"One of our young gentlemen here, black eyes, 
black hair" — describes with surprising memory 
of exact observation a fellow-serf — "was to get a 
book for me a couple of months ago." Bought 
the Muther monograph on Goya. Referred hu- 
morously to his new book — one on music. Said, 
"Many people won't believe that one can be 
equally good, or perhaps bad, at many things." 
Spoke of Arnold Bennett; said he was "a hard- 
working journalist as well as a novel writer." 
Seemed to possess the greater respect, great es- 
teem, for the character of journalist. We felt 
a reminiscence of that solid practicality of senti- 
ment of another heavy man. "Nobody but a 
blockhead," said Dr. Johnson, "ever wrote ex- 
cept for money." 

Mentioned the novel then just out, "Predes- 
tined." "He [the author] is one of our [Suri] 
men, you know." Fraternal pride and aifection 
in inflection, though he said he did not know Mr. 
Whitman. "Thank you very much indeed," he 
said at leaving. 

From his carriage, moving slowly in on the 
arm of a Japanese boy, his servant, came one 
day John La Farge. Tales of the Far East. 
[194] 



CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

profound erudition, skin of sear parchment, In- 
dian philosophies, exotic culture, incalculable age, 
inscrutable wisdom, intellectual mystery, a dig- 
nity deep in its appeal to the imagination — such 
was the connotation of this presence. (Fine as 
that portrait by Mr. Cortissoz.) An Oriental 
scholar, all right, we thought. Mr. La Farge 
was in search of some abstruse art books. He 
did not care, he said, what language they were 
in, except German. He said he hated German. 
"Well, we have to go to the German for many 
things, you know," we said. "Yes," said Mr. 
La Farge, "we have to die, too, but I don't want 
to any sooner than I can help." 

But it is not famous authors only that are in^ 
teresting. We were approached one day by a 
tall, exceedingly solemn individual who asked for 
a copy of a book the name of which sounded to us 
like the title of what "the trade" knows as "a 
juvenile." "Who wrote it?" we inquired, puz- 
zled. In a deep, hollow voice the unknown gen- 
tleman vibrated, "I did." 

A very light-coloured new Norfolk suit, with a 
high hat ; an exceedingly neat black cutaway coat 
and handsome checked trowsers, a decidedly big 
derby hat (flat on top) , an English walking coat, 

[195] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

with plaid trowsers to match, the whole about a 
dozen checks high. This ? An inventory of the 
wardrobe of Dr. Henry van Dyke, as it has been 
displayed to our appreciation. Has not the 
handsome wardrobe been a familiar feature in the 
history of literature? And does anybody like 
Dr. Goldsmith the less for having loved a lovely 
coat? 

A slight figure, very erect and alert. A dap- 
per, dignified step. Movement precise. An 
effect of a good deal of nose glasses. Black, 
heavy rims. A wide, black tape. Head perpen- 
dicular, drawn back against the neck. Grave, 
scholarly face, chiselled with much refinement of 
technique ; foil to the studious complexion, a dark, 
silken moustache. Holding our thumb-nail 
sketch up to the fight, we see it thus. 

We regret that our view of this figure so 
prominent in our literature is perforce so entirely 
external. But for this Dr. van Dyke has no one 
to blame but himself, his fastidiousness in clerks. 
Ignoring, as he passes, our offer of service, at the 
desk where he seats himself he removes his hat — 
a large head, we note, for the figure, a good deal 
of back as well as top head — and, preparing to 
write, to fill out the order forms himself, fumbles 
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CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

a great deal with his glasses, taking off and put- 
ting on again. A friend discovering him here, 
he springs up and greets him with much vivacity. 
His orders written out, he delivers them into the 
hands of the manager of the shop with whom he 
chats a bit. . . . 

Nature imitated art, indeed, when she designed 
William Gillette, remarkable fleshly incarnation 
of the literary figment, Sherlock Holmes. In 
the soul of Mr. Gillette, as on a stage, we wit- 
nessed a dramatic moral conflict. Two natures 
struggled before us within him. Which would 
prevail? Mr. Gillette was much interested in 
Rackham books. Bought a great many. In 
stock at this time was a very elaborate set in sev- 
eral quarto volumes of "Alice in Wonderland," 
most ornately bound, with Rackham designs in- 
laid in levant of various colours in the rich purple 
levant binding. The illustrations within were a 
unique, collected set of the celebrated drawings 
made by various hands for this classic. The 
price, several hundred dollars. Mr. Gillette was 
torn with temptation here. And yet was it right 
for him to be so extravagant? Periodically he 
came in, impelled to inquire if the set had yet been 

[19T]; 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

sold. If somebody only would buy the set — why, 
then, of course — it would be all over. 

In our contemplation of the literari we have 
amused ourselves with philosophic reflection. 
We recalled that old saw of Oscar Wilde's (as 
George Moore says of something of Words- 
worth's) about the artist tending always to repro- 
duce his own type. And we thought what an 
excellent model to the illustrator of his own 
"Married Life of the Frederic Carrolls" Jesse 
Lynch Williams would have been. No name it- 
self, it struck us, would be happier for Mr. 
Williams than Frederic Carroll — if it were not 
Jesse Lynch Williams. A "coUetch" chap alum- 
nus. A typical, clever, exceedingly likable 
young American husband, fairly well to do : it is 
thus we behold him. Slender, in an English 
walking coat, smiling agreeably. One, we 
thought, you would think of as a popular figure 
in a younger "set." 

It is irrelevant, certainly, but we must acknowl- 
edge our indebtedness to a lady customer who 
supposed that the "Married Life of the Frederic 
Carrolls" was an historic work, dealing with the 
domestic existence of the author of "Alice." 

Thomas Nelson Page, autographing presenta- 
[198] 



CLERK MAY LOOK AT A CELEBRITY 

tion copies of "A Coast of Bohemia,"- remarks, 
"This is one of the rewards of poetry." At this 
task, or, rather, pleasure, Mr. Page spent a good 
part of several successive days in the store. A 
gentleman, with a flavour of "the South" in his 
speech, very like his well-known pictures; stocky; 
an effect of not having, in length, much neck. 
Light, soft suit, or very becoming Prince Albert, 
and high hat. "He will wear you out," whispers 
a colleague to us; "he has no idea where any of 
his friends live. I doubt if he knows where he 
lives himself." The junior Mr. Weller, we recol- 
lect, when an inn "boots" referred to humankind 
in terms natural to his calling. "There's a pair 
of Hessians in thirteen," he said. Vievving Mr. 
Page with the eye of an attendant, we should 
remark that he is a Tartar. But a kindly, pa- 
tient, courteous Tartar. 

City directories, telephone "books," social 
registers, "Who's Whos," all are necessary to 
enable him to tell the addresses of his friends. 
And these are inadequate. He wishes to send, 
as a token of his regard, a book, affectionately in- 
scribed, to his friend, let us say, J. M. D , 

Esq. We learn by the agency of the machinery 
to which we have recourse that there reside in the 

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WAI.KING-STICK PAPERS 

City of New York four gentlemen of this iden- 
tical name: one on Madison Avenue, one on 
Ninety-first Street, another in Brooklyn, the 
other somewhere else. Mr. Page is completely 
bewildered as to wliich is his friend. "Well, I 
don't know," he says, "but this man married 
former Senator So-and-So's daughter." Now, 
can't we solve that, somehow? Historic Spirit! 
we cried that day, impracticality of literary men 
for petty, mundane details, here hast thou still 
thy habitat, a temple in Mr. Page ! 
Lor', how we do run on! 



[200] 



XIII 

CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

WHENEVER we go to England we learn 
that we "caun't" speak the language. 
We are told very frankly that we can't. And 
we very quickly perceive that, whatever it is that 
we speak, it certainly is not "the language." 

Let us consider this matter. A somewhat 
clever and an amusingly ill-natured English 
journalist, T. W. H. Crosland, not long ago 
wrote a book "knocking" us, in which he says 
"that having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beau- 
tiful language, they (that is, we Americans) 
wilfully and of set purpose distort and misspell 
it." Crosland's ignorance of all things Ameri- 
can, ingeniously revealed in this lively bit of 
writing, is interesting in a person of, presumably, 
ordinary intelligence, and his credulity in the 
matter of what he has heard about us is appar- 
ently boundless. 

However, he does not much concern us. Well- 

[201] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

behaved Englishmen would doubtless consider as 
impolite his manner of expression regarding the 
"best thing imported in the Mayflower/' But 
however unamiably, he does voice a feeling very 
general, if not universal, in England. You 
never get around — an Englishman would say 
"round" — the fact over there that we do not 
speak the English language. 

Well, to use an Americanism, they, — the Eng- 
lish. — certainly do have the drop on us in the 
matter of beauty. Mr. Chesterton somewhere 
says that a thing always to be borne in mind in 
considering England is that it is an island, that 
its people are insulated. An excellent thing to 
remember, too, in this connection, is that Eng- 
land is a flower garden. In ordinary times, after 
an Englishman is provided with a roof and four 
meals a day, the next thing he must have is a 
garden, even if it is but a flowerpot. They are 
continually talking about loveliness over there: 
it is a lovely day; it is lovely on the river now; 
it is a lovely spot. And so there are primroses 
in their speech. And then they have inherited 
over there, or borrowed or stolen, a beautiful 
literary language, worn soft in colour, like their 
black-streaked, grey-stone buildings, by time; 
[202] 



CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

and, as Whistler's Greeks did their drinking ves- 
sels, they use it because, perforce, they have no 
other. The humblest Londoner will innocently 
shame you by talking perpetually like a story- 
book. 

One day on an omnibus I asked the conductor 
where I should get off to reach a certain place. 
"Oh, that's the journey's end, sir," he replied. 
Now that is poetry. It sounds like Christina 
Rossetti. What would an American car con- 
ductor have said? "Why, that's the end of 
the line." Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asks 
the London beggar. A pretty manner of re- 
questing alms. Little boys in England are very 
fond of cigarette pictures, little cards there re- 
producing "old English flowers." I used to save 
them to give to children. Once I gave a number 
to the ringleader of a group. I was about to tell 
him to divide them up. "Oh, we'll share them, 
sir,'* he said. At home such a boy might have 
said to the others: "G'wan, these're fer me." 
Again, when I inquired my way of a tiny, ragged 
mite, he directed me to "go as straight as ever 
you can go, sir, across the cricket field ; then take 
your first right; go straight through the copse, 
sir," he called after me. The copse? Perhaps 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

I was thinking of the "cops" of New York. 
Then I understood that the urchin was speaking 
of a small wood. 

Of course he, this small boy, sang his sentences, 
with the rising and falling inflection of the lower 
classes. "Top of the street, bottom of the road, 
over the way" — so it goes. And, by the way, 
how does an Englishman know which is the top 
and which is the bottom of every street? 

Naturally, the English caun't understand us. 
"When is it that you are going 'ome?" asked my 
friend, the policeman in King's Road. 

"Oh, some time in the fall," I told him. 

"In the fall?" he inquired, puzzled. 

"Yes, September or October." 

"Oh!" he exclaimed, "in the autumn, yes, yes. 
At the fall of the leaves," I heard huu murmur 
meditatively. Meeting him later in the company 
of another policeman, "He," he said to his friend, 
nodding at me, "is going back in the fall." De- 
liciously humorous to him was my speech. Now 
it may be mentioned as an interesting point that 
many of the words imported in the Mayflower, or 
in ships following it, have been quite forgotten 
in England. Fall, as in the fall of the year, I 
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CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

think, was among them. Quite so, quite so, as 
they say in England. 

Yes, in the King's Road. For, it is an odd 
thing, Charles Scribner's Sons are on Fifth 
Avenue, but Self ridge's is in Oxford Street. 
Here we meet a man on the street; we kick him 
into it. And in England it is a very different 
thing, indeed, whether you meet a lady in the 
street or on the street. You, for instance, 
wouldn't meet a lady on the street at all. In 
fact, in England, to our mind, things are so 
turned around that it is as good as being in China. 
Just as traffic there keeps to the left kerb, instead 
of to the right curb, so whereas here I call you 
up on the telephone, there you phone me down. 
It would be awkward, wouldn't it, for me to say 
to you that I called you down? 

England is an island; and though the British 
government controls one fifth, or something like 
that, of the habitable globe, England is a very 
small place. Most of the things there are small. 
A freight car is a goods van, and it certainly is 
a goods van and not a freight car. So when you 
ask what little stream this is, you are told that 
that is the river Lea, or the river Arun, as the 
case may be, although they look, indeed, except 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

that they are far more lovely, like what we call 
"cricks" in our country. And the Englishman 
is fond of speaking in diminutives. He calls for 
a "drop of ale," to receive a pint tankard. He 
asks for a "bite of bread," when he wants half 
a loaf. His "bit of green" is a bowl of cabbage. 
He likes a "bit of cheese," in the way of a hearty 
slice, now and then. One overhearing him from 
another room might think that his copious re- 
past was a microscopic meal. About this pecu- 
liarity in the homely use of the language there 
was a joke in Punch not long ago. Said the 
village worthy in the picture: "Ah, I used to be 
as fond of a drop o' beer as any one, but nowa- 
days if I do take two or dree gallons it do knock 
I over!" 

Into the matter of the quaint features of the 
speech of the English countryside, or the won- 
ders of the Cockney dialect, the unlearned for- 
eigner hardly dare venture. It is sufficient for 
us to wonder why a railroad should be a railway. 
When it becomes a "rilewie" we are inclined, in 
our speculation, "to pass," as we say over here. 
And ale, when it is "ile," brings to mind a pleas- 
ant story. A humble Londoner, speaking of an 
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CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

oil painting of an island, referred to it as "a 
painting in ile of an oil." 

An American friend of mine, resident in Lon- 
don, insists that where there is an English word 
for a thing other than the American word for it, 
the English word is in every case better because 
it is shorter. He points to tram, for surface-car; 
and to lift, for elevator. Still though it may be 
a finer word, hoarding is not shorter than bill- 
board; nor is "dailybreader" shorter than com- 
muter. I think we break about even on that 
score. 

This, however, would seem to be true: where 
the same words are employed in a somewhat dif- 
ferent way the English are usually closer to the 
original meaning of the word. Saloon bar, for 
instance, is intended to designate a rather aristo- 
cratic place, above the public bar ; while the low- 
est "gin mill" in the United States would be 
called a "saloon." I know an American youth 
who has thought all the while that Piccadilly 
Circus was a show, like Barnum and Bailey's. 
With every thing that is round in London called 
a circus, he must have imagined it a rather hilari- 
ous place. 

The English "go on" a good deal about our 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

slang. They used to be fond of quoting in 
superior derision in their papers our, to them, 
utterly unintelligible baseball news. Mr. Cros- 
land, to drag him in again, to illustrate our abuse 
of "the language," quotes from some tenth-rate 
American author — ^which is a way they have had 
in England of judging our literature — with the 
comment that "that is not the way John Milton 
wrote." Not long ago Mr. Crosland became in- 
volved in a trial in the courts in connection with 
Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Robert 
Ross. He defended himself with much spirit 
and considerable cleverness. Among other 
things he said, as reported in the press: "What 
is this game? This gang are trying to do me 
down. Here I am a poor man up against two 
hundred quid (or some such amount) of counsel." 
Well, that wasn't the way John Milton talked, 
either. 

The English slang for money is a pleasant 
thing : thick'uns and thin'uns ; two quid, five bob ; 
tanners and coppers. And they have a good body 
of expressive and colourful speech. "On the 
rocks" is a neat and poetic way of saying "down 
and out." It is really not necessary to add the 
word "resources" to the expression "on his own." 
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CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

A "tripper" is a well-defined character, and so is 
a "flapper," a "nipper," and a "bounder." There 
had to be some word for the English "nut," as 
no amount of the language of John Milton would 
describe him; and while the connotation of this 
word as humour is different with us, the appella- 
tion of the English, when you have come to see 
it in their light, hits off" the personage very 
crisply. To say that such a one "talks like a 
ha'penny book" is, as the English say, "a jolly 
good job." And a hotel certainly is presented 
as full when it is pronounced "full up." A 
"topper" would be only one kind of a hat. Very 
well, then it is quite possible, we see, to be "all 
fed up," as they say in England, with English 
slang. 

Humorous Englishmen sometimes rather 
fancy our slang; and make naive attempts at the 
use of it. In England, for instance, a man "gets 
the sack" when he is "bounced" from his job. 
So I heard a lively Englishman attracted by the 
word say that so and so should "get the bounce." 

In writing, the Englishman usually employs 
"the language." He has his yellow journals, in- 
deed, which he calls "Americanised" newspapers. 
But crude and slovenly writing certainly is not a 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

thing that sticks out on him. What a gentle- 
manly book reviewer he is always! We have 
here in the United States perhaps a half dozen 
gentlemen who review books. Is it not true that 
you would get tired counting up the young Eng- 
lish novelists who are as accomplished writers as 
our few men of letters? The Englishman has 
a basketful of excellent periodicals to every one 
of ours. And in passing it is interesting to note 
this. When we are literary we become a little 
dull. See our high-brow journals! A^Tien we 
frolic we are a little, well, rough. The English- 
man can be funny, even hilarious, and uncon- 
sciously, confoundedly well bred at the same time. 
But he does have a rotten lot of popular illus- 
trated magazines over there compared to ours. 

When you return from a sojourn of several 
months in the land of "the language" you are im- 
mediately struck very forcibly by the vast num- 
ber of Americanisms, by the richness of our popu- 
lar speech, by the "punch" it has, and by the 
place it holds in the printed page at home. In a 
journey from New York I turned over in the 
smoking-car a number of papers I had not seen 
for some time, among them the New York 
Evening Post, Collier's, Harper's, Puck, and 
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CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

the Indianapolis News. Here, generally with- 
out quotation marks and frequently in the edi- 
torial pages, I came across these among innumer- 
able racy phrases : nothing doing, hot stuff, Right 
O! strong-arm work, some celebration, has 'em 
all skinned, mad at him, this got him in bad, 
scared of, skiddoo, beat it, a peach of a place, get 
away with the job, been stung by the party, got 
by on his bluff, sore at that fact, and always on 
the job. I learned that the weather man had 
put over his first frost last night, that a town we 
passed had come across with a sixteen-year-old 
burglar, and that a discredited politician was at- 
tempting to get out from under. Perhaps it is 
not to be wondered at that the Englishman fre- 
quently fails to get us. 

You note a change in the whole atmosphere of 
language. A pronounced instance of this differ- 
ence is found in public signs. You have been 
seeing in English conveyances the placards in 
neat type posted about which kindly request the 
traveller not to expectorate upon the floor of this 
vehicle, as to do so may cause inconvenience to 
other passengers or spread disease, and so forth 
and so on. Over here: 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

Don't Spit! 
This means You! 



This is about the way our signs of this kind go. 
Now what about all this ? I used to think many 
person just returned from England ridiculously 
affected in their speech. And many of them are 
— those who say caun't when they can't do it un- 
consciously. That is, aver here. In Britain, 
perhaps, it is just as well to make a stagger at 
speaking the way the Britains do. When you 
accidently step on an Englishman's toe, it is bet- 
ter to say "I'm sorry!" or simply "sorry," than 
to beg his pardon or ask him to excuse you. This 
makes you less conspicuous, and so more com- 
fortable. And when you stay any length of time 
you fall naturally into English ways. Then 
when you come back you seem to us, to use one 
of the Englishman's most delightful words, to 
* 'swank" dreadfully. And in that is the whole 
story. 

Mr. James declares that in the work of two 
equally good writers you could still tell by the 
writing which was that of the Englishman and 
which that of the American. The assumption 
of course is that where they differed the Ameri- 
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CAUN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE 

can would be the inferior writer. Mr. James pre- 
fers the English atmosphere. And the English- 
man is inclined to regard us in our deviation as 
a sort of imperfect reproduction of himself. 
What is his is ours, it is true; but what's ours is 
our own. That is, we have inherited a noble 
literature in common. But we write less and 
less like an Englishman all the while. Our leg- 
acy of language brought over in the Mayflower 
has become adapted to our own environment, 
been fused in the "melting-pot," and quickened 
by our own life to-day. Whether for better or 
for worse — it may be either — the literary touch is 
rapidly going by the board in modern American 
writing. One of the newer English writers re- 
marks: "A few carefully selected American 
phrases can very swiftly kill a great deal of dig- 
nity and tradition." 

Why should we speak the very excellent 
language spoken in the tight little isle across the 
sea? In Surrey they speak of the "broad Sus- 
sex" of their neighbours in the adjoining county. 
Is it exactly that we caun't? Or that we just 
don't? Because we have an article more to our 
purpose, made largely from English material, 
but made in the United States ? 

[2137 



XIV 

HUNTING LODGINGS 

SOME people say that it is the most awful 
trial. 

But it isn't so at all. 

One of the most entertaining things that can 
be done in the world, so full of interesting things, 
is to go hunting lodgings. Also, it is one of the 
most enlightening things that can be done, for, 
pursued with intelligence and energy, it gives one 
an excellent view of humankind; that is, of a 
particularly human kind of humankind. It is a 
confoundly Christian thing to do — hunting lodg- 
ings — because it opens the heart to the queer 
ways, and speech, and customs of the world. 

Now, I myself hunt lodgings as some men 
hunt wild game. 

Nothing is better when one is out of sorts, 
somewhat run down, and peevish with the world 
generally than to go out one fine afternoon and 
hunt lodgings in some remote part of town. 
•[214] 



HUNTING LODGINGS 

When in a foreign city, especially, the first 
thing I myself do, as soon as I am comfortably 
settled somewhere — and after, of course, having 
looked up the celebrated sights of the place, the 
Abbey, the Louvre, Grant's Tomb — is to put in 
a day or so hunting lodgings. 

Even to read in the papers of lodgings to let 
is refreshing and educational. All lodgings are 
"sunny" — in the papers. They are let mainly 
by "refined" persons, and are wonderfully 
"quiet." I remember last summer in London 
there was "a small sitting to let to a young lady." 
Lodgings, by the way, are usually "apartments" 
in England, as you know. Though, indeed, it is 
true that when a gentleman rents over there what 
we call a "furnished room" he is commonly said 
to "go into lodgings." A fine phrase, that; it is 
like to that fine old expression "commencing au- 
thor." And that reminds me: the most fasci- 
nating lodgings to hunt, perhaps, anywhere, are 
called "chambers." These which I mean are in 
the old Inns of Court in London. And the most 
charming of these remaining is Staple Inn, off 
Holborn. I used frequently to hunt chambers 
in "the fayrest Inne of Chancerie." There are 
no "modern conveniences" there. You draw your 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

own water at a pump in the venerable quad- 
rangle, and you "find" your own light. But to 
return: 

There was also last summer an apartment to 
let to a "respectable man" or, the announcement 
said, it "might do for friends." One of the rea- 
sons why many people are bored by hunting lodg- 
ings is that they are not humble in spirit. They 
seek proud lodgings. 

As to apartment houses, which are a very dif- 
ferent matter: the newspapers publish at vari- 
ous seasons of the year copious Apartment-House 
Directories, with innumerable half-tone illustra- 
tions of these more or less sumptions places. And 
these directories are competent commentaries on 
their subject. George Moore remarked, "With 
business I have nothing to do — my concern is 
with art." Except that I live in one, with apart- 
ment houses I have nothing to do — ^my concern 
is with lodgings. 

There is only one philosophical observation to 
be made upon apartment houses. And that is 
this: How can all these people afford to live in 
them? When you go to look at apartments you 
are shown a place that you don't like particularly. 
You don't think. Oh, how I'd just love to live 
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HUNTING LODGINGS 

here if I could only afford it! But you ask the 
rental as a matter of form. And you learn that 
this apartment rents for a sum greater (in all 
likelihood) than your entire salary. And yet, 
there are miles and miles of apartment houses 
even better than that. And goodness knows how 
many thousand people live in them! People 
whose names you never see in the newspapers as 
ones important in business, in society, art, litera- 
ture, or anything else. Obscure people! Very 
ordinary people ! Now where do they get all that 
money? But about lodgings: 

I one time went to look at lodgings in Patchin 
Place. I had heard that Patchin Place was 
America's Latin Quarter. I thought it would be 
well to examine it. Patchin Place is a cul-de-sac 
behind Jefferson Market. A bizarre female per- 
son admitted me to the house there. It was not 
unreasonable to suppose that she had a certain 
failing. She slip-slod before me along a remark- 
ably dark, rough-floored and dusky hall, and up 
a rickety stair. The lodging which she had to let 
was interesting but not attractive. The tenant, 
it seemed, who had just moved away had many 
faults trying to his landlady. He was very de- 
linquent, for one thing, in the payment of his 

[217] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

rent. And he was somewhat addicted to drink. 
This unfortunate propensity led him to keep very 
late hours, and caused him habitually to fall up- 
stairs. 

Well, I told her, by way of making talk, that 
I believed I was held to be a reasonably honest 
person, and that I was frequently sober. 

"Oh," she said, "I can see that you are a gen- 
tleman — in your way," she added, in a murmur. 

So, you see, in hunting lodgings you not only 
see how others live, but how you seem to others. 

It is certainly curious, the places in which to 
dwell which one is sho^vn in hunting lodgings. 
Once I was given to view a room in which was a 
strange table-like affair constructed of metal. 
"You wouldn't mind, I suppose," said the lady of 
the lodging, "if this remained in the room?" 

"Oh, not at all," I replied. "But what is it?" 

"Why, it's an operating table," she explained. 
"Of course, j^ou know," she added, "that I'm a 
physician. And," she continued, "of course I 
should want to make use of it now and then, but 
not regularly, not every day." 

To a lady with a patch over her eye with lodg- 
ings to let in Broome Street I one time stated, 
by way of being communicative, that I was often 
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HUNTING LODGINGS 

in my room a good deal doing some work there. 
Ah! With many ogles and gi-imaces, she whis- 
pered hoarsely, with an eiFort at a sly effect, that 
"that was all right here. She understood," she 
said. Perfectly "safe place for that," it was. 
*'The gentlemen who had the room before were 
something of the same kind." 

As you know, "references" frequently are de- 
manded of one hunting lodgings. To get into a 
really nice place one must really be a very nice 
person. "You know, I have a daughter," sighs 
the really nice landlady. 

To obtain lodgings in Kensington one must be 
very well-to-do, particularly if one would be on 
the "drawing room floor." "I like these rooms 
very much," I said to a prim person there, and I 
hesitated. 

"But I suppose they are too dear for you," 
she said. 

How careful one must be hunting lodgings in 
England about "extras." Lodgings made in the 
U.S.A. are all ready to live in, when you have 
paid your rent. But over on the other side, you 
recall, the rent, so amazingly cheap, is merely an 
item. Light, "coals," linen, and "attendance" 
are all "extra." 

[219] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

I met an interesting person letting lodgings 
in Whitechapel. She was not attractive physi- 
cally. Her chief drapery was an apron. This, 
indeed, was fairly adequate before. But — I 
think she was like the ostrich who sticks his head 
in the sand. 

]My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent wom- 
an There are, by the way, people who will 

think anything. Some may say that I am end- 
ing this article rather abruptty. 

My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman, 
used to sa}^ in compositions at school when 
stumped by material too much for her, that she 
had in her eye, so to say, things "too numerous 
to mention." 

Anybody who would chronicle his adventures 
in hunting lodgings is confronted by incidents, 
himiorous, wild, bizarre, queer, strange, peculiar, 
sentimental, touching, tragic, weird, and so on 
and so forth, "too numerous to mention." 



[220] 



XV 

MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN 

TO the best of my knowledge and belief (as 
a popular phrase has it), I am the only- 
person in the United States who corresponds with 
a London policeman. About all you know about 
the London policeman is that he is a trim and 
well-set-up figure and an efficient-looking officer. 
iWhen you have asked him your way he has re- 
plied somewhat thus: "Straight up the road, sir, 
take your first turning to the right, sir, the second 
left, sir, and then at the top of the street you 
will find it directly before you, sir." You have, 
perhaps, heard that the London police force 
offers something like an honourable career to a 
young man, that "Bobbies" are decently paid, 
that they are advanced systematically, may re- 
tire early on a fair pension, and that frequently 
they come from the country, as their innocent 
English faces and fresh complexions indicate. 
Sometimes also you have observed that in direct- 

[221] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

ing you they find it necessary to consult a pocket 
map of the town. Your general impression 
doubtless is that they are rather nice fellows. 

It was in Cheyne Walk that I met my police- 
man. I had got off the 'bus at Batter sea Bridge, 
and was seeking my way to Oakley Street, 
where I had been directed to lodgings described 
as excellent. He was a large, fat man, with a 
heavy black moustache ; and he had a very pleas- 
ant manner. When I came out that evening for 
a walk along the Embankment I came across 
him on Albert Bridge, at the "bottom," as they 
say over there, of my street. 

"You're still here, sir," he remarked cheer- 
fully. I asked him how long Mr. Whistler's Bat- 
tersea Bridge had been gone, and he told me I 
forget how many years. He had seen it and had 
been here all the while. In the course of time he 
directed me a good deal about in Chelsea, and 
so it was that I came to chat with him frequently 
in the evenings, for he "came on" at six and was 
"off" some time early in the morning. 

I was a source of some considerable interest to 
him with my odd foreign ways. "When are you 
going 'ome?" he asked me one day when our 
friendship had ripened. 
[222] 



MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN 

"Oh, some time in the fall," I replied. 

"In the fall?" he queried in a puzzled way. 

"Why, yes," I said; "September or October." 

"Oh," he remarked, "in the autumn." And I 
heard him murmur musingly, "In the fall of the 
leaves." 

Sometimes I met him in the company of his 
colleague, the "big un," or "baby," as I learned 
he was familiarly called, a very tall man with 
enormous feet clad in boots that glistened like 
great mirrors, who rocked as he walked, like a 
ship. JNIy friend had very bright eyes. They 
sparkled with merriment one day when he said 
to the big un, nodding toward me, "He's going 
'ome in the fall." 

It was a warm evening along the side of old 
Father Thames. My friend, with much grace- 
ful delicacy, made it known to me that a drop of 
"ile" now and then did not go bad with one tried 
by the cares of a policeman. So we set out for 
the nearby "King's Head and Eight Bells." 
When we came to this public house I discovered 
that it was apparently absolutely impossible for 
my friend to go in. He instructed me then in 
this way: I was to go in alone and order for my 
friend outside a pint of "mull and bitter, in a 

[223] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

tankard." The potman, he informed me, would 
bring it out to him. The expense of this refresh- 
ment was not heavy; it came to one penny ha'- 
penny. The services of the obHging potman were 
gratuitous. I found my friend in the pathway 
outside with the tankard between his hearty face 
and the sky. When he had concluded his draught, 
he thanked me, smacked his lips, wiped his mouth 
with a large handkerchief, and hurried away, as, 
he said, "the inspector" would be along presently. 
Just why the inspector would regard "ile" in the 
open air in view of the whole world less an evil 
than a tankard of mull and bitter in a public 
house I cannot say. But it may be that as long 
as one is in the open one can still keep one eye 
on one's duty. 

I was hailed several days after this by my 
friend, who approached rapidly. Well, I thought, 
he has been very useful to me, and three ha'- 
pennies are not much. 

"I have something for you," said my friend, 
somewhat heated by his haste. 

"You have?" I said. "What is it?" 

"It's a rose," replied my friend. 

"A what?" I asked. 

"A flower," said my friend, recognising that 
[224] 



MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN 

we did not speak exactly the same language. 
"You know what that is?" 

"Oh, yes. I know what a flower is," I said. 
"Where have you got it?" 

"I have secreted it in the churchyard, sir," he 
replied. "I'll fetch it directly," he added, and 
was off. 

When he returned through the gloaming he 
put the flower through my buttonhole. "A lady 
dropped it out of her carriage," he said; "and I 
thought of you when I picked it up." He stooped 
and smelled it. "Hasn't it," he said, "a lovely 
scent?" 

I had lived in New York a good while and I 
had somehow come to think of policemen rather 
as men of action than as poets. But then in New 
York we do not dwell in a flower garden; we are 
not filled with a love of horses, dogs, and blos- 
soms; and we do not aU speak unconsciously a 
literary language. 

My friend was very eager that I should let 
him "hear from" me upon my return to the 
States, and he particularly desired a postcard 
picturing a skyscraper. So he gave me his ad- 
dress, which was: 

"W. C. Buckington, P. C. B. Deversan, Chel- 

[225] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

sea Police Station, King's Road, Chelsea, S. W." 
In acknowledgment of my postcard I received 
a letter, which I think should not remain in the 
obscurity of my coat pocket. I wish to submit 
it to public attention as a model of all that a 
letter from a good friend should be, and so sel- 
dom is ! There is an engaging modesty in so large 
a man's referring to himself continually with a 
little letter "i." My correspondent tells me of 
himself, he gives me intimate news of the place of 
my recent sojourn, he touches with taste and feel- 
ing upon the great subject of our time, he con- 
veys to me patently sincere sentiments of his good 
will, and he leaves me with much appreciation 
of his excellent nature and honest heart. Occa- 
sional personal peculiarities in his stjde, devia- 
tions in unessential things from the common 
form, give a close personal touch to his message. 
This is my friend's letter: 

"Dear Friend — 

"It is with Great pleasure for to answer your 
post Card that i received this morning i was very 
pleased to receive it and to know that you are 
still in the land of the Living i have often 
thought about you and as i had not seen you i 
[226] 



MY FRIEND, THE POLICEMAN 

thought you had Gone home i have shown the 
Card to Jenkens and the tall one and also a 
nother Policeman you know and they all wish 
me to Remember them Verry kindly to you they 
was surprised to think you had taken the trouble 
to write to me they said he is a Good old sort not 
forgetting the little drops we had at the six bells 
and Kings Head. 

"P. H. What do you think of this terrable 
war it is shocking i have just Got the news that 
a cousin of mine is wounded and he is at Clacton 
on sea he is a Sergt in the 1th Coldstreams Gds 
got a wife and 4 Children i have been on the sick 
list this Last 17 days suffering from Rumitism 
but i am better London is very quiet Especially 
at Night the Pubs Close at 11 m. and half the 
Lights in the streets are out surch Lights flash- 
ing all round 2 on hyde Park Corner 2 Lambert 
Bridge 2 War office dear Friend i hope i shall 
have the Pleasure to receive a Letter from you 
before long Now i think that this is all i have 
to say at present so will close with my best re- 
spects to you your 

"Sincere friend 

"William Charles 

buckington." 
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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

The letter which later I sent him was returned 
to me by the Post Office. And that is all that I 
know of my friend, man of ardent nature and 
gentle feeling, lover of flowers, London police- 
man, gone, perhaps, to the wars. Cheyne Walk 
would not be Cheyne Walk again to me with- 
out him. 



[228] 



XVI 

HELP WANTED— MALE, FEMALE 

THE people who (because they think they 
don't need to) do not read the "Help 
Wanted" "ads" in the newspapers really ought 
to do this, anyway for a week or so in every year. 
They are the people, above all others, that would 
be most benefited by this department of jour- 
nalism. 

Now, there is nobody who more than myself 
objects in his spirit to the very common practice 
of this one's saying to that one that he, or she, 
**ought to" do this or that thing. Nobody knows 
all the circumstances in which another is placed. 
Some people insist upon saying "under the cir- 
cumstances." But that is wrong. One is sur- 
rounded by circumstances; one is not under 
them, as though they were an umbrella. No- 
body ought to say "under the circumstances." 
However, this is merely by the by. 

It's a queer thing, though, that Mr. Hilaire 

[229] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

Belloc, who certainly writes some of the best 
EngHsh going, says that "under the" and so forth 
is all right. Certainly it is not. But, as I said 
before, this is not a point about which we are 
talking. 

One ought to read want "ads" for many 
reasons. For instance, you can thus become 
completely mixed up as to whether or not you 
are still young. "Young man wanted," you will 
read, "about sixteen years of age, in an office." 
Goodness gracious ! It does seem that this is an 
age of young, very young, men. What chance 
does one of your years have now? On the other 
hand, you read: "Wanted, young man, about 
thirty-five." So! Well, this is an age, too (you 
reflect) in which people remain young. There 
are no old folks any more ; they are out of fashion. 
Witness, "Boy wanted, strong, about eighteen." 

They (want "ads") ought, particularly, to be 
read at times when you have a very good job. It 
is then especially that the reading of them is best 
for you. They do (or they ought to) soften 
your arrogance. 

If — like Mr. Rockefeller, jr. — I were a teacher 
of a Sunday school class (which, as Mr. Dooley 
used to say, I am not), I would say: "The best 
[230] 



HELP WANTED— MALE, FEMALE 

religious teaching is to be found in the help- 
wanted advertisements in the newspapers. We 
will take up this morning these columns in this 
morning's papers." 

As a matter of fact, if you are out of a job I 
should strongly advise against your reading ad- 
vertisements for help wanted. In the first place, 
nobody ever got a job through one of these ad- 
vertisements. I know this, as the phrase is, of 
my own knowledge. Then, the influence of sug- 
gestion is very powerful in these announcements. 
If you are without a position, it is depressingly 
plain to you that you are totally unqualified to 
obtain one again, of any account. If you have 
a berth paying a living wage, you perceive that 
some mysterious good fortune attends you, and 
you are made humble by fear for yourself, and 
compassionate towards others. For who are 
you, in heaven's name, and what the devil do you 
know, that you should make a living in this 
world! In this world where there is wanted: 
"Highly educated man, having extensive business 
and social connection. Must be fluent corre- 
spondent in Arabic, Japanese, and Swedish, and 
an expert accountant. Knowledge of Russian 
and the broadsword essential. Acquaintance 

[231] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

with the subject of mining engineering expected. 
Experience in the diplomatic sen^ice desired. 
Gentleman of impressive presence required. 
Highest credentials demanded. Salary, to be- 
gin, seven dollars." Knowledge, undoubtedly, is 
power ! 

Still, one seeking a position through want 
"ads" need not altogether despair. A little fur- 
ther down these very catholic columns you will 
find that: "Any person of ordinary intelligence, 
common-school education not necessary, can 
make $1000 a week writing for newspapers, by 
our system, taught by mail. Only ten minutes a 
day before going to bed required to learn." 

One thing stands out above all others in adver- 
tisements for help wanted. This is the land of 
hustle. Tinker, tailor, candlestick-maker; law- 
yer, merchant, priest; if you are not a "live-wire" 
you are not "help wanted" — "Cook wanted. On 
dairy farm, twelve miles from town. White, in- 
dustrious. Must be a live-wire! One that can 
get results. No stick-in-the-muds need apply!" 

Uplif ters and governments do not deal a more 

telling blow at the demon rum than do want 

"ads." There is no longer any job for the 

drinker. "Bartender wanted. In a very low 

[232] 



HELP WANTED— MALE, FEMALE 

place. Must be strict teetotaler!" The student 
of the help -wanted columns will come to regard 
it as a very great mystery who floats all our 
"public-houses." 

Persons whose outlook on life is restricted to 
the dull round of one occupation and to one class 
of society will find a decidedly broadening influ- 
ence in the perusal of help-wanted "ads," a liberal 
and a humane education in the subject of the 
variety and picaresque quality of humanity's 
manifold activities. And such persons will be 
made aware of their dark ignorance of many 
matters. What, for instance (they will say) is 
a "bushelman"? A gi*eat many bushelmen are 
continually "wanted." It might be well to be 
one so much in constant demand as a bushelman. 
Has this welcome character something to do with 
the delectable grocery trade ? No, my dears ( for 
though I never saw a bushelman, I'd rather see 
than be one) , he engages in the tailoring business, 
in the sweatshop way (as well as I can make 
out). 

There are people wanted in help-wanted "ads" 
(but not in real life) to do nothing but travel in 
pleasant and historic places as companions to 
wealthy, "refined" persons in delicate health. 

[233] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

There are people wanted (in want "ads") to 
share attractive homes in fashionable country- 
places whose duties will be to smoke excellent 
cigars and take naps in the afternoon. 

And there are as romantic things to be found 
among help-wanted "ads" as there are in the 
most romantic romances. Now, lest it may be 
thought that some of the help-wanted "ads" 
which I have written right out of my head to il- 
lustrate the type of each are somewhat fanciful, 
I will copy out of yesterday's paper an adver- 
tisement which "Robinson Crusoe" hasn't any- 
thing on, to put it thusly. Here you are. 

"WANTED — A man (or woman) to live 
alone on an island, eight miles from shore; food, 
shelter, clothing furnished; no work, no com- 
pensation. Summer time. Box G, 532 Times, 
Downtown." 

I knew a man once who got several replies to 
advertisements for help wanted. He bought ten 
New York papers one Sunday and a dollar's 
worth of two cent stamps. At ten o'clock in the 
evening he went out and stuffed the ballot-box, 
I mean the letter box. He said in his own hand- 
writing that he was an excellent man to be man- 
ager of "the upper floors of an apartment house" ; 
[234] 



HELP WANTED— MALE, FEMALE 

that he was uncommonly experienced in the 
moving-picture business and knew "the screen" 
from A to izzard; that he had edited trade jour- 
nals from the time he could talk; that he had an 
admirable figure for a clothing model; that he 
was very successful in interviewing bankers and 
brokers; that he was fond of children; that he 
would like to add a side line of metal polisher to 
his list; and that he certainly knew more about 
Bolivera than anybody else in the world, and 
would be prepared to head an expedition there 
by half-past two the following day. 

That man already had a job that he had got 
from a want "ad." He had been "copymg let- 
ters" at home, "light, genteel work for one of 
artistic tastes." But he found that one could 
not make any money out of it. Because, after 
one had bought the "outfit" necessary one dis- 
covered that it was humanly impossible to copy 
the bloomin' letters in the somewhat eccentric 
fashion required. 

He got several replies, as I said, to his replies 
to want "ads," this man. One was a postcard 
which read: "Call to-morrow morning about 
work, Room 954, Horseshoe Building, X. Y. Z. 
Co." Considering himself a gentleman, and being 

[235] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

4 

touchy about such things, he was annoyed at this 
manner of addressing him on a postcard. How- 
ever he went to the Horseshoe Building. Room 
954 had a great many names on the door, names 
there stated to be those of "attorneys," "syndi- 
cates," and "corporations, limited." Among 
these names was that of the X. Y. Z. Co. With- 
in, one side of Room 954 was partitioned off into 
many little alcoves. An antique, though youth- 
fully dressed, typist, by the railing near the door, 
showed our friend to the X. Y. Z. Co., who was 
seated at a bleak-looking desk in one of the little 
alcoves. The alcove contained, besides the "Co." 
(a little whiskered man, wearing his hat and 
overcoat) and the desk, an empty waste basket, 
and one unoccupied chair. 

It was a "demonstrator" that was wanted, on 
a commission basis, for a fluid to cleanse silver. 
This alcove, it developed, was merely one of many 
thousand branch offices of the "Co." scattered 
across the country. The "Co's." "factory," he 
said, was over in New Jersey, a very large affair. 

Mr. Bivens, that is the name of the gentleman 

of whom I have just been speaking, was invited, 

too, this time in a letter politely beginning "My 

Dear Sir," to call at the offices of a moving- 

r236] 



HELP WANTED— MALE, FEMALE 

pictui'e "corporation." Asking to see "M. F. 
Cummings," who had signed the letter, he was 
presented to an efficient-looking person, evidently 
an elderly, retired show-girl, who directly proved 
him wofully deficient in knowledge of "the 
screen." 

His next experience was with a portly, pros- 
perous-looking gentleman who had elaborate 
offices in a very swell skyscraper. This man 
wrote an excellent business-like letter; he un- 
folded to H. T. (I always affectionately call 
Bivens "H. T.") admiration-compelling plans 
for large business enterprises, which included a 
project of taking five hundred American business 
men on a trip through Europe after the war at a 
cost to each one of only four dollars and a half, 
the balance of the expenses of each to be paid for 
in local business co-operation. 

Bivens was taken right into this energetic and 
enterprising man's confidence. He did consider- 
able outside work for his employer for ten days. 
On the eleventh day, reporting at the office, he 
found the promotor's secretary and office boy 
awaiting him, in company with his office furni- 
ture, outside the locked door. 

Bivens next answered an advertisement for 

[237] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

a strike-breaker to light street lamps, and for a 
person to distribute handbills at a pay of seventy- 
five cents a day. But his luck had changed; he 
never got another reply to any answer to a help- 
wanted "ad." 

He thinks this is strange, because he believes 
(and I know this is true) that he writes a letter 
which would instantly mark him as a man of high 
merit among the multitude. 

But I once knew a man who put a help-wanted 
"ad" in the paper. He ran a hotel, and he ad- 
vertised for a clerk. I was stopping at his place 
at the time, I and my three brothers. And the 
five of us, Mr Snuvel (the hotel man) , I, and my 
three brothers, used to bring up from the village 
every night for a week (the place was in the 
country) the mail, which consisted of replies to 
this help-wanted advertisement. We used large 
sacks for this purpose. 



[238] 



XVII 

HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

A LITERARY adventurer not long since 
found himself, by one of the exigencies 
incident to his precarious career, turning over in 
the process of cataloguing a kind of literature in 
which up to that time he had been very little read, 
a public collection of published municipal docu- 
ments. This gentleman had had a notion for a 
good many years that municipal documents were 
entirely for very serious people engaged in some 
useful undertakings. He had never conceived of 
them as works of humour and objects of art. 
Rut his disinclination to this department of pure 
literature was dissolved, as most prejudices may 
be, by acquaintance with the subject. 

Municipal documents are human documents. 
They are the autobiographies of communities. 
The personalities of Topeka, Kansas, of 
Limoges, France, and of Heidelberg, Germany, 
rise before the impressionable student of munici- 
pal documents like the figures of personal auto- 

[239] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

biography, like Benvenuto Cellini, Marie Bash- 
kirtsev, Benjamin Franklin, Miss Mary Mac- 
lane, Mr. George Moore. 

A very touching quality in municipal docu- 
ments is their naivete — that unavoidable and un- 
conscious self-revelation which is much of the 
great charm and value of all autobiographies. 
By the way, do statisticians really understand 
municipal documents, or do they think them valu- 
able simply because they are full of statements 
of fact? 

Our literary gentleman, at all events, found 
his task very engaging, though as a cataloguer he 
was much perplexed by the extraordinary in- 
formality, in one respect, of formal public papers, 
a curious provinciality, as he could but take it to 
be, of municipalities. A very common neg- 
lect, he found, in such publications is to make 
any mention anywhere of the relation to 
geography of the community chronicling its 
history. 

He would read, for instance, that the pamphlet 
in his hand was the "Auditor's Report of Re- 
ceipts and Expenditures for the Financial Year 
Ending February 10, 1875, for the Town of 
Andover." Where, he asked, with absolute cer- 
[240] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

tainty, was the town of Andover here referred 
to? He examined the printer's imprint, which 
was explicit — personally: "Printed by Warren 
F. Draper, 1875." There was something very 
friendly about this. Printers of public docu- 
ments seem to be an amiable, neighbourly lot: 
"Printed at the Enterprise Office," one mentions 
casually in a large, warm-hearted fashion. An- 
other imprint reads, "Auburn, Printed by 
Charles Ferris, Daily Advertiser Office, 1848," 
Mr. Ferris, in his lifetime, was evidently a very 
pleasant man, but a little careless of what to him, 
no doubt, were inessential details. He was 
thoughtless of the dark ignorance in places re- 
mote from Auburn of the Daily Advertiser. 
Another prominent Auburnian of the same craft, 
one W. S. Morse, it may be learned from some 
of the products of his press, flourished in 1886. 
But, the puzzled cataloguer inquires, was INIr. 
Morse successor to Mr. Ferris, or was he official 
printer to the Government of Auburn, Maine, 
far from the scene of Mr. Ferris's public services, 
possibly in Auburn, New York? To these pica- 
yune points the breezy gentlemen make no 
reference. 

The worker with public documents turns from 

[241] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

the title pages to search the documents them- 
selves. Are these the "Proceedings of the Board 
of Chosen Freeholders" of the City of Albany, 
Missouri, or of Albany, New Hampshire? (A 
cataloguer has a faint impression that there is 
an Albany, too, somewhere in the State of New 
York.) Is this a "Copy of Warrant for Annual 
Town Meeting" of Lancaster, Massachusetts, or 
New Hampshire, or Pennsylvania? Impossible, 
he thinks, that there should be no internal evi- 
dence. 

He reads on and on. He notes the intimate 
nature of an Article 19: "To see if the town will 
accept a gift from Hannah E. Bigelow, with 
conditions." He peruses "Selectman's Ac- 
counts" of expenditures, how there was "Paid on 
account of Grammar School" such or such an 
amount; he learns the cost of "Hay Scales," the 
expenses of "Fire Dep't, Cemetery, Street 
Lamps." He peers behind the official scenes at 
Decoration Day: monies paid out of the public 
treasury for "Brass Band, Address ($20.00), 
flowers, flags, tuning piano." He goes over ap- 
propriations for "Repairs at Almshouse." He 
sits with the "Trustees of Memorial Hall," and 
informs himself concerning conditions at the 
[242] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

"Lunatic Hospital." He follows with feeling 
municipal accessions, "purchase of a Road- 
scraper, which we find a very useful machine, 
and probably money judiciously expended." 
But more and more amazed at the circumstance 
as he continues he is left totally in the dark as 
to where he is all the while. 

Sometimes the mention, made necessary in 
connection with plans for some public improve- 
ment, of a well-known river, say, revealed the 
town's location. Occasionally the comparative 
antiquity of the civilisation supplied inspiration 
for a good guess as to its situation — that it was 
the town of that name in New England rather 
than the one in Oklahoma. Multiplied clues of 
identity, again, built up a case: "Official Ballot" 
(ran the title) "for Precinct W. Attleburough, 
Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1896." The name "Wm. M. 
Olin" was given as that of the "Secretary of the 
Commonwealth." Of the first page that was all. 
In heaven's name! exclaimed the cataloguer, 
what commonwealth ? A study of the list of can- 
didates on this ballot, giving their places of resi- 
dence, however, fortified one's natural supposi- 
tion — "of Worcester, of Lynn, of Haverhill, of 
Amherst, of Pittsfield" (ah!) , "of Boston." It is 

[243] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

a reasonable surmise that this Ballot pertains to 
the commonwealth of JVIassachusetts. 

It is not here stated that the name of its native 
State is never discovered in the whole of any 
American municipal document. Often, in some 
indirect allusion, somewhere in the text it may 
be found. Frequently, too, it is true, the State 
seal is printed upon the title page or cover of the 
volume. And in instances the name of the State 
stands out clearly enough upon the page of title. 
But in case after case, in the occupation giving 
rise to this paper, the only expedient was recourse 
to a file of city directories, collating names of 
streets in these with those mentioned in the docu- 
ments. 

Another curious idiosyncrasy of one branch of 
public document — which informs the labour of 
cataloguing them with something of the alluring 
fascination of putting together jig-saw picture 
puzzles ( "spoke," in the words of Artemas Ward, 
"sarcastic") is the extraordinary variety of names 
that can be found by municipalities to entitle the 
Mayor's annual eloquence. This versatile char- 
acter may deliver himself of an Annual Address, 
Message, Communication, Statement, or of "Re- 
marks." 
[244] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

A cataloguer was surprised to discover, in "An 
Act to Incorporate and Vest Certain Powers in 
the Freeholders and Inhabitants of the village of 
Brooklyn, in the County of Kings," the prophetic 
enlightenment of the Inhabitants of that village 
in the year 1816. The voice of Andrew Carne- 
gie, Colonel Roosevelt, and Prof. Brander Mat- 
thews speaks in the following passage: "That the 
section of the town of Brooklyn, commonly 
known as 'The Fire District,' and contained 
within the following bounds, viz.: Beginning at 
the public landing south of Pierpont's distillery, 
formerly the property of Philip Livingston, de- 
ceased, on the East River, thence running along 
the public road leading from said landing to its 
intersection with Redhook lane, thence along 
Redhook lane to where it intersects Jamaica 
turnpike road, thence a North East course to the 
head of the Wallabaght mill-pond, thence thro 
the centre of said mill pond to the East river, and 
thence do^vn the East river to the place of begin- 
ning, shall continue to be known and distin- 
guished by the Name of the Village of Brooklyn." 
"Thro" certainly is phonetic spelling. 

It was the sterling character of these villagers 
that then laid the foundation for the better half 

[245] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

of a mighty city to come. The "act" concludes: 
"And then and there proceed to elect Five dis- 
creet freeholders, resident within said village, to 
be trustees thereof." So witness is borne to this 
vernacular quality of discretion in the twilight of 
Brooklyn history. 

The aesthetic consideration of municipal docu- 
ments has not received much attention. The 
format of a municipal document, however, is in 
itself a delightful essay in unconscious self -char- 
acterisation. Those of the United States ex- 
press a plain democratic people. They have, in 
fact, all the commonness of the job printer. 
* 'Printed at the Journal Office," is, indeed, their 
physical character. 

The municipal documents of Great Britain are 
usually bound, in good English book-cloth, that 
peculiar fabric to which the connoisseur of books 
is so sensitive, and which, for some inexplicable 
reason, it is, apparently, impossible to manufac- 
ture in this country ; or in neat boards, with cloth 
backs. Or if in paper it is of an interesting 
colour and texture. A noble heraldic device, the 
coat of arms of the city or borough, is stamped in 
gold above, or below, the title. This is repeated 
upon the title-page, the typography of which is 
[246] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

not without distinction. The paper has more 
refinement than that used in such American pub- 
lications. The eifect, in fine, is of something 
aristocratic. The "Mayoral Minutes" of Ken- 
sington is rather a handsome quarto volume. 

An added touch of distinction is given these 
British volumes by the presentation card, tipped 
in after the front cover. A really exquisite little 
thing is this one; it bears, placed with great 
nicety, its coat of arms above, delicately reduced 
in size; across the middle, in beautiful sensitive 
type, it reads: "With the City Accountant's 
Compliments"; in the lower left corner, in two 
lines, "Guildhall, Gloucester." 

The municipal documents of Germany are 
very German. Verwaltungsbericht is one of 
those extraordinary words which are so long that 
when you look at one end of the word you can- 
not see the other end. These volumes sometimes 
might possibly be mistaken, by a foreigner, for 
"gift books." Often they are bound, in pro- 
nounced German taste, in several strong colours 
in a striking combination. Buttressing the deco- 
rative German letters, on cover and title page, 
appears some one of various conventionalisa- 
tions of the German eagle, made very black, and 

[247] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

wearing a crown and carrying a sceptre. In 
"Verwaltungsbericht des Magistrals der Konig- 
lichen Haupt- und Residenzstadt Hanover, 
1906-7," the frontispiece, the armorial bearings, 
"Wappen der Koniglichen" and so forth is a 
powerfully coloured lithograph, a very ornate af- 
fair, of lions (of egg-yolk yellow), armour, and 
leaves and castles. These German publications 
are filled with excellent photographs of public 
places and buildings, and extensive unfolding 
coloured maps and diagrams. A gentleman with 
a taste for art viewed with much admiration a 
handsome plate of "des Dresdener Wassen- 
werks." They contain, too, these volumes, mul- 
titudes of pictures of distinguished citizens, often 
photogravures from official paintings ; these gen- 
tlemen sometimes appear decorated with mas- 
sive orders, or again decorated simply with very 
German expressions of countenance. The 
"Chronik der Haupt- und Reisdenzstadt Stutt- 
gart, 1902," somewhat suggests bound volumes 
of "Jugend," with its heavy pen and ink head 
and tail pieces, of women marketing, of a bride 
and groom kneeling at the altar, and one, an ex- 
cellent little drawing of a horse mounting with 
a heavily laden wagon a rise of ground, the driver 
[248] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

beside him, and a street lamp behind protruding 
from below (remember this is a municipal docu- 
ment). 

A quaint little duodecimo is the "Jaarbockie 
voor de Stad Delft," with little headpieces pic- 
torially representing the seasons and a curiously 
wood-cut astrologer introducing "den Almanak." 
A rather square-toed kind of a little volume, 
neatly bound in grey boards, and very nicely 
printed, having altogether an effect of house- 
wifely cleanliness, is the "Verslag van den Toe- 
stand der Gemeente Haarlem over het jaar 1894. 
Door Burgemeester en Wethouders Uitgebracht 
aan den Gemeenteraad ; imprint Gedrukt bij 
Gebr Nobels, te Haarlem." 

The language of Great Britain's municipal 
documents is lofty: "The Royal Burrough of 
Kensington, Minute of His Worship the Mayor 
(Sir H. Seymour King, K.C.I.E., M. P.) for 
the year ending November, 1901." (Here is im- 
printed the design of a quartered shield contain- 
ing a crown, a Papal hat, and two crosses, and, 
beneath, the motto: "Quid Nobis Ardui.") 
"Printed" (continues the reading) "by order of 
the Council, 30th, October, 1901. Jas. Truscott 
and Son, Printer, Suffolk Lane, E. C." And in 

[249] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

the following there is something of the rumble 
of the history of England: 

"Addresses 

Presented from the 

Court of Common Council 

to the 

King. 

On his Majesty's Accession to the Throne, 

And on various other Occasions, and his Answers, 

Resolutions of the Court, 

Granting the Freedom of the City to several 

Noble Personages ; with their Answers, 

Instructiorts at different Times to the 

Representatives of the City in Parliament. 

Petitions to Parliament for different Purposes, 

Resolutions of the Court, 

On the Memorial of the Livery, to request 

the Lord Mayor to call a Common Hall; 

For returning Thanks to Lord Chatham, 

And his Answer; 

For erecting a Statue in Guildhall, 

to 

William Beckford, Esq. ; late Lord Mayor, 

Agreed to between the 23d October, 1760, and the 

12th. October, 1770 

Printed by Henry Fenwick, Printer to the Honorable 

City of London." 

'Henry Fenwick, Esq., takes himself with dig- 
nity. 

[250] 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

But to turn from the pomp of state, to peep 
for a moment at the intimate life of the people 
of England a couple of centuries ago, few things 
could be better than "The Constable's Accounts 
of the Manor of Manchester," from which a few 
items of "Disbursements" are cited: 

"Pd. Expences apprehending two Felons .... -/!/" 
"Pd. Expences maintaining them two Nights 

in the Dungeon "/^/" 

"To Ann Duncan very ill to take her over into 

Ireland -/4/- 

"To Straw for the Dungeon -/4/- 

"To Belman sundry public Cries "A/B 

"To three pair of Stockings and dying for the 

Beedle -/9/- 

"To Wine drinking Royal healths the Prince's 

birthday at his full age 3/16/6 

"To a distressed Sailor to Leverpoole "/I/" 

"Pd. Boonfire on King's Coronation Day . . . -/6/6 

"Gave Nancy Mackeen a Stroller ~/"/6 

"Pd. Musicians at rejoicing for good news 
from Germany, and on birth of the Prince 

of Wales 2/7/- 

"Pd. for a Cat with nine Tails -/%/- 

"To a lame Stranger "/!/" 

"Pd. lighting Lamps last Dark -/2/6 

"Several Fortune Tellers Indicted, etc -/l^A 

"Pd. Lawyer Nagave advising Roger Blomely's 
Case bringing Actions agt. the Constable 
for putting him in the Dungeon for being 
drunk on Sunday in time of divine Serv- 
ice 1/1/-" 

[251] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

It is interesting to note in this connection that 
on August 16, 1762, was "Pd." one "Barnard 
Shaw maintenance of Rioters and Evidence, 
1-11-6." 

A circumstance of considerable human inter- 
est, too, and one possibly little known, is the great 
aversion to the sight of bears held by the inhabi- 
tants of the Isle of Wight, at least in the year 
1891. A copy of the "Bye-Laws" of the "Ad- 
ministrative County of the Isle of Wight," is- 
sued that year, contains, following articles re- 
lating to "Regulating the Sale of Coal" and 
"Spitting," this: 

"As to Bears. 

"1. No bear shall be taken along or allowed 
to be upon any highway, unless such bear shall 
be securely confined in a vehicle closed so as to 
completely hide such bear from view. 

"2. Any person who shall offend against this 
Bye-law shall be liable to a fine not exceeding 
in any case five pounds." 

"Atti del Municipale! Atti del Consiglio 

Comunale di Siena. Bollettino Degli atti Pub- 

blicati Dalla Giunta Municipale di Roma." It 

is fitting that quartos of such titles as these, con- 

1252J 



HUMAN MUNICIPAL DOCUMENTS 

taining addresses beginning Signori Consiglieri 
and Onorevoli Signori, should look something 
like Italian opera, and be bound in vellum, title 
and date stamped in gold on bright red and pur- 
ple labels, with sides of mottled purple boards, 
and imprints such as "Bologna. Regia Tipo- 
grafia Fratelli Merlani," and of typography the 
best. And on genuine paper, far from the wood- 
pulp of American municipal graft contracts. 

Once, indeed, municipal documents were au- 
gust pages. Some of the early Italian and Ger- 
man are on paper that will last as long as the law. 
And in these times the title pages of municipal 
documents were Piranesiesque : massive archi- 
tectural scroll work framing stone tablets, hung 
with garlands of fruit and grain, and decorated 
with carved lions, human heads, and histrionic 
masks. And initial letters throughout to corre- 
spond. 

Now who but France would bind her munici- 
pal documents in heavily tooled, full levant mo- 
rocco, with grained silk inside covers ? 



[253] 



XVIII 

AS TO PEOPLE 

IT is a very pleasant thing to go about in the 
world and see all the people. 

Among the finest people in the world to talk 
with are scrubwomen. Bartenders, particularly 
those in very low places, are not without consid- 
erable merit in this respect. Policemen and trol- 
ley-car conductors have great social value. Rus- 
tic ferry-men are very attractive intellectually. 
But for a feast of reason and a flow of soul I 
know of no society at all comparable to that of 
scrubwomen. 

It is possible that you do not cultivate scrub- 
women. That is your misfortune. Let me tell 
you about my scrubwoman. I know only this 
one, I regret to say, but she, I take it, is repre- 
sentative. 

Her name — ah, what does it matter, her name ? 
The thing beyond price is her mind. There is 
stored, in opulence, all the ready-made language, 
[254] 



AS TO PEOPLE 

the tag-ends of expression, coined by modern 
man. But she does not use this rich dross as 
others do. She touches nothing that she does 
not adorn. She turns the familiar into the un- 
expected, which is precisely what great writers 
do. To employ her own expression, she's "a hot 
sketch, all right." 

She did not like the former occupant of my 
office. No ; she told me that she "could not bear 
a hair of his head." It seems that some alterca- 
tion occurred between them. And whatever it 
was she had to say, she declares that she "told it 
to him in black and white." This gentleman, it 
seems, was "the very Old Boy." Though my 
scrubwoman admits that she herself is "a sarcas- 
tic piece of goods." By way of emphasis she in- 
variably adds to her assertions, "Believe me!" 

Her son — she has a son — ^has much trouble 
with his feet. His mother says that if he has gone 
to one "shoeopodist" he has gone to a dozen. My 
scrubwoman tells me that she is "the only fair 
one" of her family. Her people, it appears, "are 
all olive." My scrubwoman is a widow. She 
has told me a number of times of the last days of 
her husband. It is a touching story. She real- 
ised that the end was near, and humoured him in 

[255] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

his idea of returning before it was too late to 
"the old country." One day when he had asked 
her again if she had got the tickets, and then 
turned his face to the wall to cough, she said to 
herself, "/jOorZ-night — shirt." 

But most of the discourse of my scrubwoman 
is cheerful. She is a valiant figure, a brave being 
very fond of the society of her friends (of whom 
I hold myself to be one) , who works late at night, 
and talks contiiuially. I know that if you would 
contrive to find favour with your scrubwoman 
you would often be like that person told of by 
mine who "laughed until she thought his heart 
would break." 

The most brotherly car-conductors, naturallj^ 
are those Avith not over much business, those on 
lines in remote places. I remember the loss I 
suffered not long ago on a suburban car, which 
results, I am sorry to say, in your loss also. 
! The bell signalling to stop rang, and a viva- 
ciously got-up woman with an extremely broad- 
at-the-base, pear-shaped torse, arose and got her- 
self carefully oft' the car. The conductor went 
forward to assist her. When he returned aft he 
came inside the car and sat on the last seat with 
two of us who were his passengers. The restless- 
[256] 



AS TO PEOPLE 

ness was in him which betrays that a man will 
presently unbosom himself of something. This 
finally culminated in his remarking, as if simply 
for something to say to be friendly, "You no- 
ticed that lady that just got off back there? 
Well," he continued, leaning forward, having re- 
ceived a look intended to be not discouraging, 
"that's the mother of Cora Splitts, the little 
actress ; — that lady's the mother of Cora Splitts, 
the little actress." 

*'Is that so!" exclaimed one who was his pas- 
senger, not wishing to deny him the pleasure he 
expected of having excited astonishment. A car 
conductor leads a hard life, poor fellow, and one 
should not begrudge him a little pleasure like 
that. 

The conductor twisted away his face for an in- 
stant while he spat tobacco- juice. Thus cleared 
for action, he returned to the subject of his 
thoughts. "That's the mother of Cora Splitts," 
he repeated again. "She's at White Plains to- 
night, Cora is. Cora and me," he said, as one that 
says, "ah, me, what a world it is!" — "Cora and 
me was chums once. Yes, sir ; we was chums and 
went to school together." Some valuable reminis- 
cences of the distinguished woman, dating back 

[257] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

to days before the world dreamed of what she 
would become, by one who played with her as a 
child, doubtless would have been told, but the 
conductor was interrupted; a great many peo- 
ple got off, some others got on the car just then, 
and he went forward to collect fares from these, 
and the thread was broken. 

At my journey's end, I recollect, I went into 
a public-house. There was a person there whose 
presence made a deep impression upon my mem- 
ory. A fine stocky lad, with a great square jaw, 
heavy beery jowls, and a blue-black, bearded 
chin; in a blue striped collar. He put both 
hands firmly on the bar-rail at a good distance 
apart ; straightened his arms taut and his body at 
right angles with them, so that he resembled a 
huge carpenter's square; then curled his back 
finely in, and said, with a significant look at the 
man behind the bar, "Gimme one o' them shells." 
A thin glass of beer was set before him; he re- 
laxed, straightened up, and drank off its con- 
tents. Then, apparently, feeling that he was ob- 
served, he looked very unconcernedly all about 
the room and appeared to be bored. He then 
examined very attentively a picture on the wall, 
and his neck seemed to be temporarily stiff. I 
[258] 



AS TO PEOPLE 

can see him now, I am happy to say, as plain as 
print. 

One's mind is, indeed, a grand photograph al- 
bum. How precious to one it will be when one 
is old and may sit all day in a house by the sea 
and, so to say, turn the leaves. That is why one 
should be going about all the while in one's vigour 
with an alert and an open mind. 

Wives are picturesque characters, too. I mind 
me of my friend Billy Henderson's new wife. 
Billy Henderson's wife looks like a balloon. 
She's so fat that she has busted down the arches 
of her feet. In order to "fight flesh" she walks 
a great deal. She walks a mile every day, and 
then takes a car back home. Her father comes 
over from Philadelphia once every week to see 
her, because she is so homesick. For months 
after she was married she just cried all the time, 
she was so homesick. She never goes to the mov- 
ies. The movies make her cry. One time she 
saw at the movies a hospital scene. It horrified 
her for days. A friend of hers is about to be 
married. But she has told her friend that she 
cannot go to the wedding. Weddings always 
make her cry so. She just can't read the war 
news; it is too terrible; it affects her so that she 

[259] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

can't sleep a bit. She hasn't read any of it at 
all, and, she says, she has no idea who is winning 
the war. She takes some kind of capsules to 
reduce flesh, which cost six dollars for fifty. She 
has taken twenty-five. The extension of the 
draft age being spoken of, she said to Billy: 
"Dearie, I'll put you under the bed where they 
won't get you." She doesn't want to vote, and 
she can't understand why any one should want 
to go to poles and vote and all that kind of thing. 
Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is 
rich; she is an excellent cook; she loves Billy 
Henderson. 



[260] 



XIX 

HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP 

THE panorama before his view is the human 
mind. He panders to its divers follies, con- 
sults its varied wisdom. He stands umbrella- 
less in the rain of all its idiosyncrasies. Why has 
he not lifted up his voice? He, the book clerk, 
that lives among countless volumes of confes- 
sions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by 
hour with a living Comedie Humaine ! Has the 
constant spectacle of so many books been astrin- 
gent in its effect upon any latent creative im- 
pulse? Or has he been dumb in the colloquial 
sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr. Whistler's 
guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered 
booksellers" of England have, indeed, given us 
some reminiscences of bookselling and its hu- 
mours. But they were the old boys. They be- 
longed to an old order and reflected another day. 
"As physicians are called 'The Faculty' and 
counsellor s-at-law 'The Profession,' " writes 

[261] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

Boswell, "the booksellers of London are called 
'The Trade.' " Let us look into this Trade as 
it is to-day, we said. So for a space we played 
we were a book clerk. 

There are two, decidedly contradictory, popu- 
lar conceptions of the man whose business it is 
to sell books. One is the sentimental notion 
of an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a 
dreamer and an idealist, who keeps a second- 
hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him 
are in the pages of Anatole France. He is a 
man of much erudition. And books are his wife 
and family, food and drink. Then there is the 
other idea. "Why is it," we report the remark 
of an important looking gentleman in a high hat, 
"that clerks in book stores never know anything 
about books?" (or anything else, was perhaps 
not far from his thought.) This gentleman, it 
was readily perceived, had an idea that he had 
said something rather good. But it was not new. 
This conception of the book clerk is one of the 
world's seven jokes — brother to that of the 
mother-in-law. The book clerk of this view is 
a familiar figure in the pages of humour, like the 
talkative barber or the comic Irishman of the 
vaudeville stage — a stock character. His ilhter- 
[262] 



HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP 

acy is classic; his ignorant sayings irresistable. 
He was sired by Charles Keene and damned by 
Punch. Phil May was his godfather; and 
every industrious humourist employs him period- 
ically. These two ideas of the book business are 
perhaps reconciled by the popularly cherished 
sentiment that book sellers are not what they 
were. Newspapers from time to time print fea- 
ture articles about the days "When Book Sellers 
Knew Books." If you ask a salesman in a mod- 
ern book shop if he has "Praed," you of course ex- 
pect him to reply, "I have, sir (or madam), but 
it doesn't seem to do any good." 

Well, at the Zoo there is humour from the in- 
side looking out, as well as from the outside look- 
ing in. The book clerk is in the position to re- 
mark certain human phenomena patent to him 
beyond the view of any other, most curious, per- 
haps, among them a pleasant hypocrisy. "Oh!" 
purls a sweet lady, pausing to glance for the 
space of a second at her surroundings, "I think 
books are just fine!" "I love to be in a book 
store," rattles a vivacious young woman. "Books 
have the greatest fascination for me," says an- 
other. A young lady waiting for friends looks 
out of the front door the entire time. Her 

[263] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

friends express regret at having kept her wait- 
ing. "Oh!" she exclaims, "I have been so happy 
here" — glancing quickly around at the books — 
*'I should just like to be left here a couple of 
years." There is a respectful pause by all for 
an instant, each bringing into her face an expres- 
sion of adoration for the dear things of the mind. 
Then, chatting gaily, the party hastens away. 
We turn to hear, "Oh, wouldn't you love to live 
in a book shop!" 

What is it that all men say in a book shop? 
The great say it, even, and the far from great. 
Each in his turn looks solemnly at his com- 
panion or at the salesman and says: "Of the 
making of books there is no end." Then each 
in his turn lights into a smile. He has said 
something pretty good. 

"There are persons esteemed on their reputa- 
tion," says the "Imitation of Christ," "who by 
showing themselves destroy the opinion one had 
of them." Though one might think it would be 
the other way, it is difficult, indeed, to sell a book 
to a friend of the author. "Oh, I know the man 
who wrote that," is the reply. "I wouldn't read 
a book of his." You see, a great writer must be 
dead. A common error of book buyers is to con- 
[264] 



HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP 

fuse the words edition and copy. "Let me have 
a clean edition of this," is frequently asked. 
Once a lady asked for something * 'bound in ging- 
ham." No one, it is our belief, ever sold a light 
book to a Japanese. They are the book clerk's 
dread. Terribly intelligent, somewhat unintelli- 
gible in their handling of our language, they al- 
ways want something exceedingly difficult to 
find, something usually on military or political 
science, harbour construction or the most recon- 
dite form of philosophy. 

Then there are the remarkable people who 
"keep up" with the flood of fiction; who say, "Oh, 
I've read that," in a tone which implies that they 
are not so far behind as that! "Have you no new 
novels?" they inquire. Novels get "old," one 
might suppose, like eggs, in a couple of days. 
The quest of these seekers of books suggests the 
story of the lady at a public library who, upon 
being told that seven new novels had come in that 
morning, said, "Give me, please, the one that 
came in last." There are, too, those singular 
folks who appear regularly every year just be- 
fore Christmas, buy a great quantity of books 
for presents, and disappear again until the next 
year just before the holiday season. What, we 

[265] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

have wondered, do they do about books the rest 
of the time? Ministers are always very trying 
characters to book clerks. "Beware of the gal- 
lery," says a fellow serf to us, "there's a minister 
browsing around up there." The official servants 
of the Lord fall, in the book clerk's mind, into 
that class technically described by him as "stick- 
ers." All gentlemen wearing high hats also be- 
long to this classification. Deaf customers are 
embarrassing, for the reason that one always 
addresses one's next customer as though he were 
deaf, too. Foreigners are invariably very polite 
to clerks. They bow when they enter and take 
off their hats upon leaving. Very respectful peo- 
ple. "There," said a fellow thrall, "come two 
old women in at the door. Now, if I were my an- 
cestor, I'd dance around that table with a stone 
club and brain them." As it is, they ask, "Have 
you Hopkinson Smith's 'Gondola Days'?" He 
says, "I think so." A lady, very rich and im- 
portant looking, wants a book "without an un- 
pleasant ending." "I wonder how this is" (look- 
ing at the last page). "No" (closing the book 
with a thump), "that won't do." A gentleman 
orders two sets of the Prayer Book and Hymnal, 
to be marked upon the cover with his name, the 
[266] 



HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP 

words Grace Church and his pew number. He 
informs us that every year while he is away in 
the summer his set of these books is stolen. 

'Tis a merry life, the book clerk's, and a hard 
one. Customers: Two youngish women. "Can 
you wait on us?" They want to get something, 
do not know just what, for a present. "Oh, no!" 
they say, "we don't want anything like so big a 
set as that. Something nicely bound." A copy 
of "Cranford" is near by. "Oh, when I read it 
I didn't think it much good." "Poetry?" "No, 
I don't think she is much interested in poetry." 

"Do you suppose an art book?" "No, she is 

not interested in art." "Memoirs, then?" "No, 
she would not care for that." "Why, I had no 
idea," said one somewhat reprovingly to us, "that 
it would be as hard as this." 

A calling which requires the practitioner to 
turn easily from the recondite gentleman inquir- 
ing the author of "Religious Teachers of An- 
cient Greece" to consideration of the problem 
(no less recondite) of a lady anxious to find some- 
thing to entertain a child of five and a half in- 
culcates some degree of mental agility. "I 
want," said the very fashionable lady, "to get a 
book for an old man — a" (with some petulance) 

[267] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

"very stupid old man.'* "I want," from a seri- 
ous old lady, "to get a book for a young man 
studying for the ministry." "I want," exclaimed 
a very smart apparition, "a dashing book for a 
man!" "WTiat is the best book on Russia?" "Do 
you know, now, if this is a good story? — there are 
so many poor books nowadays." Says a large, 
uncommonly black lady, "I want 'Spears of 
Wheat, No. 3.' " (Discovered to be a prayer 
book.) "I want the latest book, please, on how 
to bring up a baby." "I'd like to see what you 
have on 'physical research.' " "Can you recom- 
mend a book for a young man with softening of 
the brain? Poor fellow, he's in Bloomingdale." 
"Is there any discount to Christian workers?" 
"Do you know," a demure person, an awful 
blank look coming over her face, "what I want 
has gone quite out of my head." There is an ap- 
pealing look for help. "Something American," 
in a patrician voice, "for the ladies to read going 
over on the boat. This is American, now, is it? 
New York society? Ah, very good! Have 'you 
anything about the Rocky Mountains, or that 
sort of thing?" 

Now we see coming the man who has been di- 
rected in a letter from his wife to get a certain 
[268] 



HUMOURS OF THE BOOK SHOP 

l)ook, about which he knows nothing, and the 
title of which he can not decipher. Here is a 
person asking for "comfort books" for the sick. 
Here is Mrs. So-and-So, who tells us her hus- 
band is very ill, unconscious ; she has to sit up by 
him all night, and must have something "very 
amusing" to divert her mind. Here is the angry 
man to whom by mistake was sent a book in- 
scribed "to my good wife and true." Heaven 
help the poor book clerk when the same good 
wife and true comes in with her present of a 
naughty book with humorous remarks written 
in it I 

Now, how do you like the job? 



[269] 



XX 

THE DECEASED 

I THINK it was William Hazlitt's brother 
who remarked that "no young man thinks 
he will ever die." Whoever it was he was a mys- 
terious person who lives for us now in that one 
enduring observation. That is his "literary re- 
mains," his "complete works." And many a 
man has written a good deal more and said a 
good deal less than that concerning that "animal, 
man" (in Swift's phrase), who, as Sir Thomas 
Browne observes, "begins to die wlien he begins 
to live." 

No young man, I should say, reads obituary 
notices. They are hardly "live news" to him. 
Most of us, I fancy, regard these "items" more 
or less as "dead matter" which papers for some 
reason or other are obliged to carry. But old 
people, I have noticed, those whose days are num- 
bered, whose autumnal friends are fast falling, 
as if leaf by leaf from the creaking tree, those 
[270] 



THE DECEASED 

regularly turn to the obituary column, which, 
doubtless, is filled with what are "personals" for 
them. 

And yet, if all but knew it, there is not in the 
press any reading so improving as the "obits" 
(to use the newspaper term) , none of so soften- 
ing and refining a nature, none so calculated to 
inspire one with the Christian feelings of pity 
and charity, with the sentiment of malice toward 
none, to bring anon a smile of tender regard for 
one's fellow mortals, to teach that man is an ad- 
mirable creature, full of courage and faith withal, 
constantly striving for the light, interesting be- 
yond measure, that his destiny is divinely inscru- 
table, that dust unto dust all men are brothers, 
and that he, man, is (in the words of "Urn 
Burial") "a noble animal, splendid in ashes and 
pompous in the tomb." I doubt very much in- 
deed whether any one could read obituaries every 
day for a year and remain a bad man or woman. 

In many respects, the best obituaries are to 
be found in country papers. There, in country 
papers, none ever dies. It may be because, as 
it is said, the country is nearer to God than the 
town. But so it is that there, in country papers, 
in the fulness of time, or by the fell clutch of 

[271] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

chance, one "enters into his final rest," or "passes 
from his earth life," or one "on Wed. last peace- 
fully accepted the summons to Eternity," or "on 
Thurs." (it may be) "passed to his eternal re- 
ward." "Died" is indeed a hard word. It has 
never found admittance to hearts that love and 
esteem. Whitman (was it not?) when he heard 
that Carlyle was dead went out in the night and 
looked up at the stars and said that he did not 
believe it. Even so, are not all who take their 
passing "highly esteemed" in country papers? 
In small places, doubtless, death wears for the 
community a more tragic mein than in cities, 
where it is more frequent and where we knew 
not him that lies on his bier next door but one 
away. In the country places this man who is 
now no longer upright and quick was a neighbour 
to all. And the provincial writer of obituaries 
follows a high authority, another rustic poet, 
deathless and known throughout the world, who 
sang of his Hoosier friend "he is not dead but 
just away." 

When one enters upon his last role in this 
world, which all fill in their turn, he becomes in 
rural journals that personage known through- 
out the countryside as "the deceased." It might 
[272] 



THE DECEASED 

be argued that, alas! the only thing you can do 
with one deceased is to bury him. It might be 
held that you cannot educate him. That he, the 
deceased, cannot enter upon the first steps of 
his career as a bookkeeper. That he cannot 
marry the daughter of the Governor of the State. 
That whatever happened to him, whatever he ac- 
complished, enjoyed, endured, in his pilgrimage 
through this world he experienced before he be- 
came, as it is said, deceased. That, in short, he 
is now dead. And that it should be said of him, 
as we say in the Metropolitan press, as a young 
man Mr. Doe did this and later that. But in 
places simpler, and so more eloquent, than the 
Metropolis the final fact of one's existence col- 
ours all the former things of his career. In 
country obituaries all that has been done was 
done by the deceased. In this association of 
ideas between the prime and the close of life is 
to be felt a sentiment which knits together each 
scene. This Mr. Some One did not merely ap- 
prentice himself to a printer at fourteen (as city 
papers say it) and marry at twenty-one. But 
he that is now deceased was once full of hope 
and strength (at fourteen) , and in the brave days 
of twenty-one did he, that is now struck down, 

[273] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

plight his troth. So, dou1)tless, runs the thought 
in that intimate phrase so dear to country pa- 
pers, "the deceased." 

And there are no funerals in the country. 
That is a word, funeral, of too forbidding, omi- 
nous, a sound to be under the broad and open 
sky. There where the neighbours gather, all 
those who knew and loved the departed from a 
boy, the "last sad rites are read," and the "mor- 
tuary services are performed." Then from the 
fruitfid valley where he dwelt after his fathers, 
and their fathers, he mounts again the old red 
hill, bird enchanted. 

He is not buried, though he rests in the warm 
clasp of the caressing earth. Buried has an in- 
human sound, as though a man were a bone. 
The deceased is always "interred," or he may be 
"laid to rest," or his "interment takes place." 

Now, it is in these biogi'aphical annals of small 
places that one finds the justest estimates of life. 
There folks are valued for what they are as well 
as for what they do. Inner worth is held in re- 
gard equally with the flash and glitter of what 
the great world calls success. I was reading just 
the other day of a late gentleman, "aged 61," 
whose principal concern appeared to be devotion 
[274] 



THE DECEASED 

to his family. His filial feeling was indeed re- 
markable. It was told that "after the death of 
his parents, three years ago, he had resided with 
his sister." After his attachment to his own peo- 
ple, his chief interest, apparently, was in the 
things of the mind, in literature. He had "never 
engaged in business," it was said, but he "was a 
great reader," he could "talk intelligently on 
many topics which interested him," and in the 
circles which he frequented he was admired, that 
is it was thought that he was "quite a bright 
man." Who would not feel in this sympathetic 
record of his goodly span something of the charm 
of the modest nature of this man? Again, there 
was the recent intelligence concerning William 
Jackson, "a coloured gentleman employed as a 
deck hand on a pleasure craft in this harbour," 
who "met his demise" in an untimely manner. 
Clothes do not make the man, nor doth occupa- 
tion decree the bearing. This is a great and fun- 
damental truth very clearly grasped by the coun- 
try obituary, and much obscured elsewhere. 

On the other hand, positively nowhere else does 
the heart to dare and the power to do find such 
generous recognition as in the obituaries of coun- 
try papers. The "prominence" of blacksmiths, 

[275] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

general store keepers, undertakers, notaries pub- 
lic, and other townspeople bright in local fame 
has been made a jest by urban persons of a hu- 
morous inclination, who take scorn of merit be- 
cause it is not vast merit. Pleasing to contem- 
plate in contrast to this w^aspish spirit is the noble 
nature of the country obituary, inspiration to 
humanism. Here was a man, to the seeing eye, 
of sterling stamp: "He attended public gram- 
mar school where he profited by his opportuni- 
ties in obtaining as good an education as possible, 
etc." Later in life, he became "well and favour- 
ably known for his conservative and sane business 
methods," and was esteemed by his associates, it 
is said, "fraternal^ and otherwise." He was 
"mourned," by those who "survived" him, as 
people are not mourned in cities, that is, frankly, 
in a manner undisguised. Country obituaries are 
not afraid to be themselves. In this is their ap- 
peal to the himian heart. 

Thej^ are the same in spirit, identical in turn 
of phrase, from Maine to California, from the 
Gulf to the Upper Provinces. That is one of 
the remarkable things about them. You might 
expect to come across, here or there, a writer of 
country paper obituaries out of step, as it were, 
[276] 



THE DECEASED 

with his fellow mutes, so to put it, one raising his 
voice in a slightly off, or different key, a trace, 
in short, of the hand of some student of the modes 
of thought of the world beyond his bosky dell 
or rolling plain. But it is not so in any paper 
truly of the countryside. And, perhaps, that is 
well. 

A type of obituary which very likely is read 
rather generally in cities is that of slow growth 
and released from the newspaper-office "morgue'* 
as occasion calls. One such timely and capable 
biographical account is waiting for each of us 
that is a Vice-President, King, lord of great do- 
minions, high commander of armed forces, intel- 
lectual immortal of any kind, recognised super- 
man in this or that. Big Chief anywhere, or be- 
loved popular idol, nicely proportioned accord- 
ing to our space value. Of course, if we are a 
very great Mogul indeed we get a display head 
on the first page upon the dramatic occasion of 
our exit. But, generally speaking, this type of 
matter would run somewhere between the seventh 
and the thirteenth or fifteenth page, according to 
the number of pages of the issue of the paper 
coinciding with the date of the ending of our 
day's work. There, if we are pretty important, 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

we should lead the column, and take a two-line 
head, with a pendant "comb." This, altogether, 
would announce to the passing eye that we went 
out (as the poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 
puts it) in such or such a year of our age, that 
pneumonia, or what not, "took" us, that we were 
a member of one of the city's oldest families, that 
a family breach was healed at the death of our 
sister, or the general points of whatever it is that 
makes us interesting to the paper's circulation. 
We are likely to have a date line and a brief des- 
patch from Rome, or Savannah, or wherever we 
happen to be when we shuffle off, stating that we 
have done so. This to be followed by a "shirt- 
tail dash." Then begins a beautifully dispassion- 
ate and highly dignified recital of the salient facts 
connected with our career, which may run to a 
couple of sticks, or, even, did our activities com- 
mand it, turn the column. 

Or, suppose for the sake of our discussion that 
your achievements have not been quite of the 
first rank. You get a one-line head, a sub-head, 
and a couple of paragraphs. Somebody has ex- 
claimed concerning how much life it takes to 
make a little art. Just so. How much life it 
takes to make a very little obituary in the great 
[278] 



THE DECEASED 

city! Early and late, day in and day out, week 
in and week out, month in and month out, in the 
sun's hot eye of summer, through the winter's 
blizzard, year after year for thirty-six years you 
have been a busy practising physician. You have 
lived in the thick of births and life and death 
for thousands of hours. What you know, and 
have lived and have seen would fill rows of vol- 
umes. You are a distinguished member of many 
learned societies, widely known as an educator. 
You are good for about a hundred and fifty 
words. 

Perhaps not. Perhaps you were a person of 
rather minor importance. You are, that is, you 
were, we will say, an astronomer, or you were a 
mineralogist, or a former Alderman, or some- 
thing like that. So you call for a paragraph, with 
a head. Your virtues (and your vices) have been 
many. You were three times married. As Mr. 
Bennett says of another of like momentous his- 
tory, the love of life was in you, three times you 
rose triumphant over death. Goodness! what a 
novel you would make. You call for a para- 
graph, with a head. All your clubs are given. 

You are doing pretty well. Many of us, just 
somebodies but nobodies in especial particular, 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

do not have a separate head at all but go in a 
group into the feature "Obituary Notes." Our 
names are set in "caps," and we have a brisk 
paragraph apiece, admirable pieces of composi- 
tion, pellucid, compact, nervous. Our stories are 
contained in these dry-point-like portraits stript 
of all that was occasional, accidental, ephemeral, 
leaving alone the essential facts, such as, for in- 
stance, that we were, say, a civil engineer. I 
think it would be well for each of us occasionally 
to visualise his obituary "note." This should 
have the effect of clarifying our outlook. Amid 
the welter of existence what is it that we are 
above all to do ? To thine own self be true. You 
are a husband, a father, and a civil engineer. 
That is all that matters in the end. 

But after all, all obituaries in a great city are 
for the elect. The great majority of us have 
none at all, in print. What we were is, indeed, 
graven on the hearts that knew us, and told in 
the places where we have been. But in the writ- 
ten word we go into the feature headed "Died," 
a department similar in design to that on the 
literary page headed "Books Received." We 
are arranged alphabetically according to the first 
letter of our surnames. We are set in small type 
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THE DECEASED 

with lines following the name line indented. It 
is difficult for me to tell with certainty from the 
printed page but I think we are set without leads. 
Here again, frequently, the reader comes upon 
the breath of affection, the hand of some one near 
to the one that is gone: "Beloved husband 

of ." And he is touched by the realisation 

that even in the rushing city, somewhere unseen 
amid the hard glitter and the gay scene, to-day 
warm hearts are torn, and that simple grief 
throbs in and makes perennially poignant a bro- 
midian phrase. 

As this column lengthens the paragraphs 
shorten, until is reached what seems to me the 
most moving obituary of all, that most eloquent 

of the destiny of men. "ROE. Richard. 

1272 West 96th St., Dec. 30, aged 54." It is 
like to the most moving line, perhaps, in mod- 
ern literature. For nowhere else, I think, is 
there one of such simplicity and grandeur as this 
from "The Old Wives' Tale": "He had once 
been young, and he had grown old, and was now 
dead." 



[281] 



XXI 

A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

THERE is certainly no more grotesque fal- 
lacy than that humorously bigoted notion 
so generally entertained, particularly by our 
friends of other nations (at any rate, before the 
war) , that the only thing in the world for which 
we as a people care is success as measured by 
money. A walk about any day will give this 
ridiculous idea a black eye. Any one with ears 
to his head will perceive that we scorn things 
which are to be had for money. Money! What 
is that? Phew! Everybody has it. It is mine, 
it is yours, it is nothing — trash. Any one with 
a brain-pan under his hat will recognise inside 
of half an hour that we are anything but a na- 
tion of shopkeepers spiritually. It is as plain as 
a pike-staff that we are a nation of perfectly 
rabid idealists. It is sounded on every side that 
the things which we most fervently prize, inordi- 
nately covet, envy possession of, and hold most 
[282] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

proudly, are precisely those things which the 
wealth of the Indies would not procure. To wit: 

Jimmy was a waiter, humble, but celebrated — 
as a waiter — among a circle. An admirer of 
Jimmy's, a journalist continually on the lookout 
for copy, wrote him up for the paper at space 
rates. Thence till the day Broadway suffered 
his loss by untimely death did Jimmy fold and 
unfold his worn cHpping to exhibit with a full 
heart this tribute to him which was of a kind (as 
he never failed to say) which "money could not 
buy." It is reported upon reasonably re- 
liable authoritj'' that Jimmy's last words, in a 
faint whisper, were: "Money could not have 
bought " And then he went on his way. 

So it was, too, with a tobacconist whom I knew 
— who had an article framed which referred to 
his shop. "In such a paper, too!" he exclaimed 
a hundred times a day, "money could not have 
bought it." 

Your aunt has a lot of old spavined furniture 
which would bring about tu'pence at public sale. 
Some of it was your great-aunt's. All of it has 
been in the family from time immemorial; and 
its peculiar and considerable value, your aunt 
and her neighbours are agreed, resides in the 

[283] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

esoteric fact that it is the kind of thing which 
"money couldn't buy.'* 

Health is a great blessing, and, we are repeat- 
edly told, we should prize it beyond measure, — 
as it is a thing that money will not buy. 

His money, it is commonly said of a rich man 
in bereavement, will not bring his son back to 
life. The impotency of money in the life of the 
spirit is notorious among us. Of a deceased 
miser we declare with satisfaction: "Well, he 
can't take his money with him." And money — 
the righteous well know — will get none into 
heaven. 

What is the moving theme that holds the mul- 
titude at the movie theatre bound in a spell? 
What is it that answers deep unto deep be- 
tween the literature vended at drug stores and 
the people? — Concern for money overthrown by 
idealism ! The triumph of ethereal love over the 
base temptation of lucre! Is it not so: the rich 
wooer in the top hat and the elegant Easter- 
parade coat is turned away, and the poor lover 
with his flannel shirt open at the collar and a 
dinner-pail hung upon his arm is chosen for blue- 
bird happiness — and the heart of the maligned 
masses is satisfied. 
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A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

Money (the conviction has passed into an in- 
dustrious bromideum) will not buy happiness. 

I knew a man who had a wife; and he was 
told by sage counsellors that if he would treat her 
right she would give him "what money could not 
buy." 

But what need is there to multiply examples? 
Take a turn around the block and return with 
the wisdom that money can not buy. Come ; get 
your stick and let us go. 

A beneficent Providence, sir, has caused it to 
be that the finest shows in this world are free of 
all men. Nature charges no admission fee. The 
dawn and the evening are gratis. In the matter 
of art, the performances of the little men of the 
passing hour are to be seen in Bond Street, on 
the Avenue, and at the academies and societies, 
for a price; but those treasure houses of the en- 
during masterpieces, the great museums of the 
world, demand naught from him that hath noth- 
ing. A collector of customs sitteth at the golden 
door of the movies; but the far more delightful 
and far more human shows shown in the show 
windows are quite free for all to see. And to 
those blessed ones whose eyes have not lost their 
innocence and whose hearts remain sweet and 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

simple the costly spectacles of the world are but 
tawdry vanity as compared with the feasts of 
entertaimnent enacted daily in show windows. 

One of the very best theatres in this country 
for entertainments of this nature is lower Sixth 
Avenue, though the Bowery is not to be over- 
looked, and the passionate lover of pleasure 
should not neglect any business thoroughfare 
which presents a particularly shabby appearance. 
The actors and actresses in these fascinating his- 
trionic presentations are not called comedians 
and tragedians, comediennes and tragediennes — 
but "demonstrators." The effect of their per- 
formances thus is twofold : they gratify the spec- 
tator's sense of the humorous or the curious, and 
they demonstrate to his intelligence the value of 
something with whose merits possibly he is not 
acquainted. 

There are not many things in life, I think, 
which you find pleasanter than this: You are 
slightly obstructed in your perambulations on a 
fine afternoon by a small knot of loiterers paus- 
ing before a shop window in which an active 
young man of admirably mobile countenance is 
holding forth in dumb show. Your progress is 
slackened as you edge about the throng with the 
[286] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

intention of proceeding on your way. As it 
were, you poise on the wing. Then, like a warm- 
ing liquor stealing through the veins, the awaken- 
ing of your interest in the artful antics of this 
young man makes fainter and fainter your will 
to proceed on your course, until it dies softly 
away. What is this ridiculous thing he is doing? 
By its magnetism it has, at any rate, become for 
you the supreme interest, for the moment, of 
the universe. 

With a horrible grimace the young man yanks 
fiercely at his cravat. It does not budge, or at 
least only very slightly. With still further dis- 
play of energetic effort, accompanied by a fero- 
cious expression of pained and enraged exaspera- 
tion, he yanks again. No, the cravat is stuck 
fast behind within the collar. With a gesture of 
hopeless despair and a face of pitiful woe the 
young man abandons his struggle with the ordi- 
nary kind of cravat which loops around the neck, 
and which, foolishly enough, is so universally 
worn. You see, so his eloquent flinging out of 
the hands saith, it is of no use. He shakes his 
fist. Then, registering the extremity of disgust, 
he rips the loathesome, cravat-clogged collar 
from his neck and flings it from him. 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

What will he do now? is the thought that holds 
his audience bound in a spell. Ah ! His face 
breaks into light. He snatches up his collar and 
industriously adjusts it without a cravat. He 
picks up a small object which he holds aloft be- 
tween thumb and forefinger, turning it this way 
and that. It is the ready-made bow of a bow tie, 
the bow and nothing more. Yes, there are patent 
prongs to it, which he deftly slips beneath the 
wings of his collar. So! No trouble whatever. 
Instantaneous. A smile of luxurious blandness 
spreads over the face of the young man. Thus 
he stands for a moment. Then stoops and places 
in a corner of the window a large card inscribed 
"Ten Cents." With a pleasing sense of curi- 
osity satisfied, the current of your own life as 
distinct from show-window shows flows back 
again into your consciousness. You turn, and 
the great movement of the city takes you, al- 
though some souls of spacious leisure and of ap- 
parently insatiable curiosity linger on to drink 
in the happiness of witnessing a repetition of the 
fascinating exhibition. 

Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom 
of heaven. There is the other young man in a 
show window a bit further on who all day long 
[288] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, onl5r 
to sharpen it to greater keenness, so that before 
you he continually cuts with it the finest hairs. 
There is the young woman garbed as a nurse 
who treats the corns on a gigantic plaster foot. 
In show windows cooks are cooking appetising 
dishes ; damsels are combing magnificent, patent- 
medicine grown tresses; and in show windows are 
spectacles of infinite variety and without num- 
ber. All for the delight without cost of a penny 
of those whose hearts are as a little child. There 
is the trim maid who folds and unfolds a Daven- 
port couch. I had a friend one time of a rovinsr 
disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got 
the amazingly enviable job of doing nothing but 
smoke an endless succession of cigars in a show 
window. 

Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is 
nothing high about the cost of pleasure. But 
hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here? 
Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng 
to do it reverence, it is, to an ardent mind, the 
most enticing, and the most instructive, of all 
the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pave- 
ment, the one fullest of all of (in the words of 
oneQuinney) "meat and gravy." Always tarry^ 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

fellow man, before the cheap photographer's. 
Any one who has ever been enough interested 
in hiunan matters to examine the sidewalk exhi- 
bitions of the cheap photographer does not need 
to be told that the fine old star character there, a 
character somewhat analogous in popular appeal 
and his permanency as an institution to the heavy 
villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, 
yet fresh as the morning, is the naked baby. 
Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer's display 
without its naked baby. Just why he should be 
naked is not clear. However, there is undoubt- 
edly inherent in the mind of the race this instinct, 
— that you should begin your photographic life 
naked. Perhaps this is in response to a senti- 
ment for symbol : naked came ye into the world. 
Perhaps it is because your face at the time of 
your initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by 
time that it is deemed more interesting to display 
tlie whole of you, clothed, as it were, in innocence. 
The art of painting, of course, from the earliest 
rendering of the Child of the Virgin down to 
^lary Cassatt, has been fond of portraying in- 
fants nude, — the photographer may be said only 
to continue a very old tradition. But painting 
has always observed the baby with ceremonious 
[290] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

respect; painting stripped him to admire him 
and softly caress him. The broad hmnanity of 
the cheap photographer "jokes" him, as you may 
say. 

The most popular way of presenting the baby 
at the cheap photographer's, — seated, standing, 
on his back, or on his belly; stark naked, or (as 
sometimes he is found) girded about the loins, 
or (as, again, he is seen) less naked and wearing 
an abbreviated shirt, and in various other stages 
of habilimentation, — is on a whitish hairy rug. 
No background but the hairy rug. It is back- 
ground (very largely), one suspects, that gives 
one the sense of a baby's value. The idea occurs 
to a thoughtful observer of his photograph that 
it is to a considerable degree from background, 
surrounding atmosphere, local colour, that the 
baby derives personal identity. Twenty cabinet- 
sized naked babies, each on a hairy rug: — one 
conceives how an unscrupulous photographer (as 
may very likely commonly be the case) might 
save money on negatives, after he had a stock of 
a little variety, by snapping babies with an un- 
loaded camera and printing from old plates, 
without anybody's being the wiser. (Here, in- 
deed, would be a utilitarian motive behind the 

[291] . 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

l)aby's being naked of articles of identification.) 
It is, alas! undermining to the pride of race to 
reflect that that photograph of one's cousin's 
fine new baby Edward, which reminded every 
one so much of the infant's mother, may not im- 
possibly have been the original likeness of some 
baby now long extinct. 

History, so called, deals exclusively with per- 
sons of distinction ; fiction, though more catholic, 
sees man in a glamour, with the various preju- 
dices this way and that of a mortal eye. The 
development of the discovery announced by 
Daguerre in 1839, and first apphed to portraits 
by one Draper, — this is the great historian. The 
photograph business, sir, alone sees life steadily 
and sees it whole. Photography is the supreme 
sociologist, master psychologist. In the side- 
walk display of the cheap photographer is the 
poor, naked, human story, — poignantly touch- 
ing, chastening of pride, opening the heart of 
the responsive beholder to deeper knowledge of 
the inlierent kinship of all humankind. 

How does the consummate realism of the 
cheap photographer show its babies of yester- 
year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years 
and simple honours? 
[292] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL. 

That appealing spectacle, the girl who has 
performed somewhere in curiously home-made- 
looking "tights," and, laughing roguishly at the 
camera, been photographed afterward (from this 
sight what roue would not turn away his sinful 
eyes in shame and pity?). The highly satisfied 
young man in the very rented-appearing evening 
clothes (photographed, it is apparent, in the day 
time) . The blank-looking person who for some 
cryptic reason is enamoured of the studious, liter- 
ary pose, and appears, in effect like a frontis- 
piece portrait, glancing up from a writing table 
(an obviously artificial cigar between the fingers 
of one hand, apparently made of carbon, and, 
presumably, the property of the photographer) . 
The aspiring amateur boxer, in position, with his 
sparing trunks on and an American flag around 
his waist (or sometimes, in default of trunks, he 
is seen in his nether undergarment). The jolly 
girl in boy's clothes (who has not seen her?). 
The little child in costume performing a cute 
dance. The coloured beau, a heavy swell, in 
spats and a van Bibber overcoat. The gay ban- 
queters of the So-and-So Association, around 
their festive board (one man, devilish fellow! 
holding aloft a beer bottle) . The young girl in 

[293] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

confirmation attire, standing awkwardly by a 
table (her slip of a mind, as she stands there, 
very probably less upon her God than upon her 
common, foolish dress). The team of amateur 
comedians (sad spectacle!). The bride and 
groom (perennial as the naked baby) standing, 
curiously enough, upon our old friend, the hairy 
rug. The family group (all the figures of which 
have a curious wax-work effect, reminiscent of 
the late Eden Musee) . The policeman, in uni- 
form (sitting in a chair of cathedral architec- 
ture). The fireman (a hero, perhaps, — though 
no man is a hero, merely amazingly human, to 
the cheap photographer's camera). The youth- 
ful swains posed beside that indestructible stage 
property of the popular photographer, the arti- 
ficial tree stump. The immortal woman vain of 
that part of her which Mr. Mantalini referred 
to as "outline," and careful to keep her near arm 
from obstructing the spectator's view (some- 
times she is clothed; sometimes simply wound in 
a sheet; sometimes, in either case, she is like the 
Dowager whose outline Mr. Mantalini described 
as "dem'd"). All these — and many others — are 
the traditions of the cheap photography. 

Nobody, apparently, is so unattractive, no- 
[294] 



A TOWN CONSTITUTIONAL 

body so poor, nobody wears such queer clothes, 
nobody is so old, or faded, or fat, or "skinny," 
or short, or tall, or black, or bow-legged, or so 
anything at all, that he or she won't pose for a 
photograph. So that it may reasonably be said, 
that to have lost the instinct to have one's "pic- 
ture taken" is to have lost the love of life. No- 
body, no doubt, but is interesting to somebody. 
And, as Stevenson has said, can any one be re- 
garded as useless so long as he has a friend ? 

And when — brother — at length, one has with- 
drawn forevermore from the tawdry stage of the 
cheap photographer's, a last view is taken of 
one, as it were, in the grave. Side by side at the 
cheap photographer's with the naked baby and 
with the bride and groom — is the "floral 
emblem." 



[295] 



xxn 

READING AFTER THIRTY 

SOMEWHERE in the mass of that splen- 
did, highly personal journalism of his, 
William Hazlitt declares that he was never able 
to read a book through after thirty. That pene- 
trating man, Samuel Butler, reflecting in his 
"Note-Books" on "What Audience to Write 
For," says : "People between the ages of twenty 
and thirty read a good deal, after thirty their 
reading drops off and by forty is confined to each 
person's special subject, newspapers and maga- 
zines." Thirty again, you see. 

We all have friends who have been omniverous 
readers, persons who, to our admiration and de- 
spair, seem to have read everything in "litera- 
ture." It may have struck us, however, as a 
curious thing that, except possibly in rare in- 
stances, such persons appear not to read much 
now, beyond newspapers and magazines. The 
upshot of what they are able to say, when you 
[296] 



READING AFTER THIRTY 

ask them why this is true, is that one simply 
reaches a time of life when one "quits reading," 
as one ceases to dance, or cools in interest toward 
the latest fashions in overcoats. 

But, undoubtedly there are persons who con- 
tinue to read, apparently with unabated industry 
and zest, no matter how old they may become. 
Dr. Johnson, of course, was a constant reader 
all his life, and would cheerfully read anything 
whether it was readable or not. Though did not 
he somewhere confess to himself that he did not 
read things through ? Mr. Huneker, who is well 
on the richer side of thirty, would seem to read 
everything printed about five minutes after it has 
left the press, and before anybody else has had 
a chance to see it. There are so many capital 
letters on the pages of his own books that it 
makes one dizzy to look at them. Whether or 
not he reads through all the books he mentions 
is of course (as he is a reviewer) a question. 
And, then, both Mr. Huneker and the Doctor 
belong to the trade, so to say. Another start- 
lingly prodigious reader is Theodore Koosevelt, 
hilariously past thirty, and not exclusively 
identified with literary "shop." He is contin- 
ually discovering and vigorously recommending 

[297] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

new poets and short-story writers whom profes- 
sional critics have not yet had time to get around 
to. It does not appear that a fundamental or 
organic change in the composition of the human 
brain which inhibits reading occurs more or less 
suddenly at thirty. 

Why then do so many reading animals cease 
at about that time to read? Butler does not say. 
Arnold Bennett (was it not?) has asked what's 
the use of his reading more, he knows enough. 
Hazlitt, in his own case, surmised that the keener 
interest of writing rather asphyxiated the im- 
pulse to read. And, doubtless, that generally is 
about the size of it. As in the cure of the drink 
habit, a new and more intense interest will drive 
out the old. The reader, of course, is a spec- 
tator, not an active participant in the world's 
doings. After thirty, desirable citizens of ordi- 
nary energy have little opportunity for the role 
of noncombatant, and the taste of action and of 
success, like the taste of war, makes them impa- 
tient with quieter things. Failures read more 
than successful men. Bachelors no doubt read 
much more than husbands. And fathers seldom 
are great readers. This last fact maj^^ explain 
the observation that even college professors do 
[298] 



READING AFTER THIRTY 

not read fanatically. When they are "off" 
awhile they "play with" their children (children 
are gi-eat enemies everywhere to reading), who 
are much more real to them than study. 

In one of his later books George Moore chron- 
icles his resolve to cultivate the habit of reading, 
to learn to read again. And he sucks much 
naive pleasure from the contemplation of this 
prospective enterprise; but he finds it very diffi- 
cult to persevere in it, and drifts away instead 
into reveries of what he has read. There is a 
thought here, however, to be hearkened to: the 
idea of learning to read again. 

What is it that happens to one in consequence 
of his ceasing to read? He suffers a hardening 
of the intellectual arteries. There are quaint old 
codgers one knows here and there who declare 
that in fiction there has "been nothing since 
Dickens." They are delightful, of course; but 
one would rather see than be one. We all know 
many persons whose intellectual clock stopped 
some time ago, and there are people whose minds 
apparently froze at about the time when they 
should have begun to ripen, and which are like 
blocks of ice with a fish (or a volume of Huxley) 
inside. Nothing now can get in. 

[299] 



At those times of earnest introspection, when 
one would "swear off" this or that, would reduce 
one's smoking, would adopt the principle of "do 
it now," and so on — at those times an excellent 
New Year's resolution, or birthday resolution, or 
first day of the month resolution, would be to 
re-learn to read, to keep, as Dr. Johnson said of 
his friendships, one's reading continually "in 
good repair." 



[800] 



EPILOGUE 
ON WEARING A HAT 

THERE is a good deal to be said about wear- 
ing a hat. And yet this humorous cus- 
tom, this rich topic, of wearing a hat has been 
sadly neglected, as far as I can make out, by 
scholars, scientists, poets, composers, and other 
"smart" people. 

Man has been variously defined, as the reli- 
gious animal, and so on; but also, to the best of 
my knowledge and belief, he is the only animal 
that wears a hat. He has become so accustomed 
to the habit of wearing his hat that he does not 
feel that he is himself out of doors without it. 
Mr. Howells (I think it was) has told us in one 
of his novels of a young man who had determined 
upon suicide. With this intent he made a mad 
dash for the sea. But on his way there a sudden 
gust of wind blew off his hat; instinctively he 
turned to recover it, and this action broke the 
current of his ideas. With his hat he recovered 

[301] 



WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

his reason, and went home as alive as usual. His 
hat has come to mean for man much more than 
a protection for his head. It is for him a symbol 
of his manhood. You cannot more greatly in- 
sult a man than by knocking off his hat. As a 
sign of his reverence, his esteem, his respect, a 
man bares his head. Though, indeed, the con- 
tentious Mr. Chesterton somewhere argues that 
there is no more reason for a man's removing 
his hat in the presence of ladies than for his tak- 
ing off his coat and waistcoat. 

In the more complex social organisms of Eu- 
rope the custom of lifting the hat to other men 
whom one thus acknowledges as superiors is 
much more prevalent than in our democratic 
country. Though in America we remove our 
hats in elevators upon the entrance of ladies, a 
practice which is not followed in England. It 
was Mrs. Nickleby who indicated the extreme 
politeness of the noble gentlemen who showed 
her to her carriage by the celebrated remark that 
they took their hats "completely off." We ex- 
press great joy by casting our hats into the air. 
If I wish to show my contempt for you I will 
wear my hat in your house ; if I wish you to clear 
out of my house I say: "Here's your hat"; if I 
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ON WEARING A HAT 

am moved to admiration for you I say: "I take 
off my hat to you." I greatly enjoy seeing you 
run after your hat in the street, because you are 
thereby made excessively ridiculous. The comic 
Irishman of the vaudeville stage makes his char- 
acter unmistakable to all by carrying his clay 
pipe in his hat band. The English painter, 
Thomas Gainsborough, gave his name to a hat. 
The seasoned newspaper man displays his cynical 
nature and complete disillusionment by wearing 
his hat at his desk. A hat worn tilted well back 
on the head indicates an open nature and a hail- 
fellow-well-met disposition ; while a hat decidedly 
tilted over one eye is the sign of a hard character, 
and one not to be trifled with. In the literature of 
alcoholism it is written that a common hallucina- 
tion of the inebriate is that a voice cries after 
him: "Where did you get that white hat?" 
•Upon assuming office the cardinal is said to "take 
the hat." When a man is conspicuously active 
in American political life "his hat is in the ring." 
Whistler topped off his press-agent eccentricity 
with a funny hat. The most idiosyncratic hat at 
present in America is that which decorates the 
peak of Mr. Bliss Carman. The hat-stands in 
our swagger hotels make a great deal of money; 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

I know a gentleman who affirmed that a hat 
which had originally cost him three dollars had 
cost him eighteen dollars to be got back from hat- 
checking stands. Cheap people evade the hat- 
boy. 

When the present enthusiast for the splendid 
subject of hats was a small boy it was the ambi- 
tion of every small boy of his acquaintance to 
be regarded as of sufficient age to possess what 
we termed a "dice hat," what is commonly called 
a "derby," what in England they call a "darby," 
what Dickens aptly referred to as a "pot-hat," 
what, in one highly diverting form, is sometimes 
referred to on the other side as a "billycock." 
That singular structure for the human head, the 
derby hat, one time well-nigh universally worn, 
has now gone somewhat out of fashion and been 
superseded by the soft hat of smart design, 
though there are indications, I fear, that the 
derby is coming in again. When we were young 
the soft hat was most commonly worn by vet- 
erans of the Civil War, in a pattern called a 
"slouch hat" or "Grand Army hat." Though, 
indeed, such romantic beings as cowboys in popu- 
lar ten cent literature and the late Buffalo Bill 
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ON WEARING A HAT 

wore sombreros, and the picturesque Mexican a 
high peaked affair. 

Our grandfathers wore "stove-pipe hats"; and 
the hats of politicians were one time frequently- 
called "plug hats." This male head-dress even 
more extraordinary than the derby, books of 
etiquette sometimes say you should not call a 
"silk hat" but a "high hat." In London but a 
few years ago no man ever went into the City 
with other than a top -hat, or "topper" as they 
say there. It is said that the going out of gen- 
eral favour of the silk hat has been occasioned 
in a considerable degree by the popularity of 
raincoats in preference to umbrellas. If you 
observe any great crowd in England to-day you 
will find in it few hats of any kind; it is in the 
main a sea of caps. The American "dude" and 
the anti-bellum British "knut" always wore silk 
hats. Gentlemen at the British race courses and 
fine old clubmen of Pall Mall affect a white or 
grey top hat, of the sort which was so becoming 
an ornament to the late King Edward. The 
opera hat is said to have startled many persons 
who had not seen it before. Intoxicated gentle- 
men in funny pictures have always smashed their 
silk hats. Some men have worn a silk hat only 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

on the occasion of their marriage. High hats 
are worn by small boys in England. The most 
useful occupation to-day is that which envolves 
the wearing of a "tin hat." 

The day in the autumn fixed by popular man- 
date when the straw hat is to be discarded for 
the season is hilariously celebrated in Wall Street 
by the destruction by the affronted populace of 
the straw hats of those who have had the temerity 
or the thoughtlessness to wear them. Coloured 
men in livery stables, however, sometimes wear 
straw hats the year round. To the habit gen- 
erally of wearing a hat baldness is attributed by 
some. And the luxuriant hair of Indians and 
of the cave-man is pointed to as illustrating the 
beneficent result of not wearing a hat. And 
now and then somebody turns up with the idea 
in his head that he doesn't need a hat on it. 
There is a white garbed gentleman of Grecian 
mould who parades Broadway every day without 
a hat. 

It is indisputable that the hats women wear 
to-day are more beautiful than they have been 
for generations, perhaps centuries. Yet this 
fact has met with little expression of apprecia- 
tion. This present excellence is because women's 
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ON WEARING A HAT 

hats now are the product of intellectual design. 
In the '80's the idea was entertained that deco- 
ration of a woman's hat was increased by attach- 
ing to it something in the way of beads or 
feathers wherever there was a space free. A 
fashionable woman's hat to-day may be as simple 
and, in its way, as effective as art as a Whistler 
symphony; a single splotch of colour, it may be, 
acting as a foil against a rich mass. Or the hat 
is a replica, as it were, of the celebrated design of 
a period in history. But the erudite subject of 
women's hats should not be touched upon without 
a salute to that racy model which crowns the 
far-famed 'Arriet, whose Bank-holiday attire 
was so delightedly caressed by the pencil of the 
late Phil May. None could forget his tenderly 
human drawing of the lady with the bedraggled 
feather over one eye who has just been ejected 
by the bar-man, and who turns to him to say: 
"Well, the next time I goes into a public house, 
I goes where I'm respected!" 

A hat is distinguished from a cap or bonnet by 
the possession of a brim. The modern hat can 
be traced back to the petasus worn by the ancient 
Romans when on a journey; and hats were also 
thus used by the earlier Greeks. Not until after 

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WALKING-STICK PAPERS 

the Norman conquest did the use of hats begin in 
England. A "hatte of biever" was worn by one 
of the *'nobels of the lande, mett at Clarendom" 
about the middle of the 12th century; and Frois- 
sart describes hats that were worn at Edward's 
court in 1340, when the Garter order was insti- 
tuted. The use of the scarlet hat which distin- 
guishes cardinals was sanctioned in the 13th cen- 
tury by Pope Innocent IV. The merchant in 
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales had 

"On his head a Flaundrish bever hat"; 

and from this period onwards frequent mention 
is made of "felt hattes," "beever hattes," and 
other like names. Throughout mediaeval times 
the wearing of a hat was regarded as a mark 
of rank and distinction. During the reign of 
Elizabeth the caprices of fashion in hats were 
many and various. 

The Puritans affected a steeple crown and 
broad brimmed hat, while the Cavaliers adopted 
a lower crown and a broader brim ornamented 
with feathers. In the time of Charles II. still 
greater breadth of brim and a profusion of 
feathers were fashionable features of hats, and 
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ON WEARING A HAT 

the gradual expansion of brim led to the device 
of looping or tying up that portion. Hence 
arose various fashionable "cocks" in hats; and 
ultimately, by the looping up equally of three 
sides of the low-crowned hat, the cocked hat 
which prevailed throughout the 18th century was 
elaborated. The Quaker hat, plain, low in 
crown, and broad in brim, originated with the 
sect in the middle of the 17th century. The 
silk hat is an article of recent introduction. 
Though it was known in Florence about a cen- 
tury ago, its manufacture was not introduced 
into France till about 1825, and its development 
has taken place entirely since that period. In 
all kinds of hat-making the French excel ; in the 
United Kingdom the felt hat trade is principally 
centred in the neighbourhood of Manchester; and 
in the United States the States of New York and 
New Jersey enjoy the greater part of the in- 
dustry. 

So much for hats. 



£a09l 



3l|.77-9 



